Copy value of watch variable in visual studio with

Question

Ok, this one has been driving me bonkers for ages and VS 2010 hasn't improved this. Say I have a variable like so

string szSql = 
@"SELECT 
     Foo, Bar
FROM
     Table
WHERE
     Foo = Bar";

If I'm inspecting this in the debugger and choose "Copy Value" the value put into the clipboard has \r\n's in place of the carriage returns which is a bit of a pain. Is there a way to change this behaviour? (I know I can print it in the command window...)

Cheers,

Alex

Answer 1

Append ,nq (short for no quotes) to the variable name in the watch window and it will display the string without escape characters, which you could then copy. For reference the MSDN document is here.

Answer 2

Use the "text visualizer" popup on the value and copy it to the clipboard from there. It will be unescaped.

Answer 3

For lengthy text, such as a large xml document, I always use the immediate window. Just type this in and hit enter:

System.Diagnostics.Debug.WriteLine(szSql)

and it will spit out the text with line breaks and without escape characters. I then copy from the immediate window.