I really want to remove all comments like: #This does this for example, as I annotated it ages ago, and I want to try and work out what all the parts of the code do, without going through 600+ lines and deleting them individually.
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Terry Jan Reedy
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18166
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Since IDLE doesn't have a "remove all comments" menu item, I don't think this question really has anything to do with IDLE. You could have equivalently asked "how do I remove comments from a Python script?" without making any mention of the IDE. – Kevin Feb 10 '15 at 15:38
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In the interpreter, or the editor? You can easily make another program to remove comments. – Malik Brahimi Feb 10 '15 at 15:39
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Use an editor that supports regex search and replace, e.g. in vim I could naively do `:%s/#.*$//g` [assuming there are no '#'s in string literals]. – AChampion Feb 10 '15 at 15:43
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oh, what a miracle. Posted an answer for a question which is marked as dupe 25 mins ago. – Avinash Raj Feb 10 '15 at 16:05
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@MalikBrahimi The editor. Is that not what IDLE is? – 18166 Feb 10 '15 at 17:38
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Yes, I mean which mode: interactive or scripting. – Malik Brahimi Feb 10 '15 at 17:54
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@MalikBrahimi The scripting mode. I am still new to programming in general, and I have no idea how to do this without wasting a lot of time deleting each line. – 18166 Feb 10 '15 at 17:56
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Do you have any hash tags in strings? – Malik Brahimi Feb 10 '15 at 17:58
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Then use a for loop to iterate through the lines, find a hashtag, and remove everything after. – Malik Brahimi Feb 11 '15 at 16:29
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@MalikBrahimi That's why I was asking, I don't know how to do that. – 18166 Feb 11 '15 at 16:56
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Well you'll need to reopen the question so that I can write an answer. – Malik Brahimi Feb 11 '15 at 17:05
1 Answers
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For this, you could use re module.
>>> s = """foo bar
#This does this
# foo bar
bar foo"""
>>> for i in s.split('\n'):
if not re.match(r'\s*#', i):
print(i)
foo bar
bar foo
Avinash Raj
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Probably better to use `\s*` before the `#`, in case the OP (or some future visitor) uses tabs. Also, note that this will struggle with e.g. multiline strings *within* the code. – jonrsharpe Feb 10 '15 at 16:18
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since we are splitting the input according to the `\n` chaarcter, `\s*` at the start won't create any problems. – Avinash Raj Feb 10 '15 at 16:25
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Thanks for the answer, but this doesn't answer my question - I meant how to remove them in the script editor, which I thought was called IDLE. I will edit my question for this. – 18166 Feb 10 '15 at 17:37