Decommenter

This utility removes comments from a file. It figures out the comment syntax from the file extension, and outputs a file that is functionally identical but stripped of any comments.

It's smart enough to keep "comments" inside quotes, e.g. "This will still #be in the output."

If your source file is malformed, the output is undefined; e.g. an unclosed string terminator.

#! on the first line is preserved.

This is an alpha version of the software, use with caution.

Installation

Install with go install github.com/coljac/decomment/cmd/dec@v0.0.2, or download a binary from the Releases page.

Usage

When passed one more files as arguments, dec will figure out the syntax from the file extension (see below). This can be overridden with the -f flag, passing a format matching a usual file extension (e.g. -f java for Java). If no legal format is specified dec will check for a C-style comment at the first line, otherwise will default to # comments.

To specify a file format manually:

dec -c "/*,*/" -c "//" myfile - C-style comments. When the second token is ommitted, a newline is assumed. The same syntax with -q applies to quote delimiters; no regex, and two tokens are required.

Examples

To decomment a file and write to stdout:

dec source.c

To edit in-place

dec -i *.java

From stdin:

cat myfile.c | dec -f c > out.c

Some weird file format:

dec -c "~~,~~" -q "','" myfile.foo

Known issues

• Mixed HTML and Javascript will not remove javascript comments.
• If the final line of the source file has no newline, one will be inserted.
• Trailing whitespace will be removed at the end of lines.

ToDo

• An expanded list of source file types
• More robust testing

Built-in formats

dec knows about commments and strings in:

| syntax | File extension | | ---------- | ------------------ | | C/C++ | .c, .h, .cpp, .hpp | | Java | .java | | Rust | .rs | | Python | .py | | (z|ba)?sh | .sh | | Go | .go | | Kotlin | .kt | | JavaScript | .js | | TypeScript | .ts | | Perl | .pl | | Ruby | .rb | | SQL | .sql | | PHP | .php | | HTML | .html | | CSS | .css |