in reply to Re: Stripping Comments from Source
in thread Stripping Comments from Source

If you're skiled with Perl, any reason why you can't write a script (a Perl script, of course) to use a regex to strip out comments from your other Perl script?

It's not trivial to parse Perl even for a skilled programmer!

e.g. regarding comments, you have to handle # delimiters and # in strings

$a="/#/";
$a=~ s#/##g;

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(update) and these are only simple cases, even perltidy and PPI can fail in pathological cases. For a detailed discussion search for perl static parsing!

Cheers Rolf

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Re^3: Stripping Comments from Source
by AnomalousMonk (Archbishop) on May 12, 2010 at 15:37 UTC

    Not to mention my own favorite syntax-highlighting-editor-confusers  $#array (highest index of @array) and the  $# special variable!

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      seriously ... which editors?

      I somehow remember emacs having problems with s### 10 years ago with a then antique perl-mode...

      Cheers Rolf

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        seriously ... which editors?
        Just look at syntax highlighting. They all have code snippets where they highlight it the wrong way.
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        Nothing so sophisticated as emacs. Basically, editors, not terribly modern, designed to be most at ease in C/C++/Java and the like; can't remember specifically just which one(s) just now.

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Re^3: Stripping Comments from Source
by mzedeler (Pilgrim) on May 13, 2010 at 11:56 UTC 
    # FIXME Why doesn't this change behaviour when I compile it?
print <<'END_TEXT';
Just stripping the remaining chars starting with # will not work
END_TEXT

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Re^3: Stripping Comments from Source
by ambrus (Abbot) on May 14, 2010 at 10:40 UTC
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