How to search for uses of a type name in Visual Studio without getting false positives?

Question

I need to find all instances of type xxx::Box in a VC++ solution. Searching for "xxx::Box" is easy, but often the namespace isn't used... searching for "Box" also matches

• GetBoundingBox()
• *pBox
• //how many Boxes
• etc

I was wondering if the weird VS regex searching could help me, but I'm not sure. How can I only search for Box when it could be at the start of a line, or a parameter type, etc?

Answer 1

You can use word boundaries (denoted by \b) around the literal Box to only match the word "Box" (and not "Boxes" or "pBox" or some other prefix/suffix):

\bBox\b