Smart Paste Add-In for Visual Studio 2008

Say you need to paste a chunk of XML (or WKT) into Visual Studio as a string literal (for your unit tests, or what not). How would you do it?

In C#, string literals can be represented in two ways:

C# supports two forms of string literals: regular string literals and verbatim string literals.

A regular string literal consists of zero or more characters enclosed in double quotes, as in "hello", and may include both simple escape sequences (such as \t for the tab character) and hexadecimal and Unicode escape sequences.

A verbatim string literal consists of an @ character followed by a double-quote character, zero or more characters, and a closing double-quote character. A simple example is @"hello". In a verbatim string literal, the characters between the delimiters are interpreted verbatim, the only exception being a quote-escape-sequence. In particular, simple escape sequences and hexadecimal and Unicode escape sequences are not processed in verbatim string literals. A verbatim string literal may span multiple lines.

MSDNmsdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa691090.aspx

So when you have a chunk of text that looks like this:

PROJCS["OSGB 1936 / British National Grid",
    GEOGCS["OSGB 1936",
        DATUM["OSGB_1936",
            SPHEROID["Airy 1830",6377563.396,299.3249646,AUTHORITY["EPSG","7001"]],
            TOWGS84[375,-111,431,,,,],
            AUTHORITY["EPSG","6277"]],
        PRIMEM["Greenwich",,AUTHORITY["EPSG","8901"]],
        UNIT["DMSH",0.0174532925199433,AUTHORITY["EPSG","9108"]],
        AXIS["Lat",NORTH],
        AXIS["Long",EAST],
        AUTHORITY["EPSG","4277"]]

How would you go about turning this into an escaped string literal (verbatim or regular)?

Being as most programmers are, well, lazy, I didn’t want to do yet another find/replace session. I googled for the first thing that came to mind, “Smart Paste Visual Studio 2008”. I found this great add-in called Smart Paster by Alex Papadimoulis (creator of TheDailyWTF), which adds a highly configurable “Paste As…” context menu:

And now, all I need to do is “Paste As” string, to get this (with a few tweaks):

"    PROJCS[\"OSGB 1936 / British National Grid\"," +
"        GEOGCS[\"OSGB 1936\"," +
"            DATUM[\"OSGB_1936\"," +
"                SPHEROID[\"Airy 1830\",6377563.396,299.3249646,AUTHORITY[\"EPSG\",\"7001\"]]," +
"                TOWGS84[375,-111,431,0,0,0,0]," +
"                AUTHORITY[\"EPSG\",\"6277\"]]," +
"            PRIMEM[\"Greenwich\",0,AUTHORITY[\"EPSG\",\"8901\"]]," +
"            UNIT[\"DMSH\",0.0174532925199433,AUTHORITY[\"EPSG\",\"9108\"]]," +
"            AXIS[\"Lat\",NORTH]," +
"            AXIS[\"Long\",EAST]," +
"            AUTHORITY[\"EPSG\",\"4277\"]]"

Thanks for the Add-in, Alex!