decommenter

Automatically decomment code, for use cases including minimization, removal of PII, and cleanup.

Additionally, decommenter supports recommenting the decommented code by exporting the extracted comments to a separate file. Using the recomment mode, those comments can be reinserted.

Usage

Requires Python 3.8+ to be installed

It is possible older versions work, but I cannot guarantee functionality. decommenter was developed in 3.12.

python cli.py [-h] [--mode {decomment,recomment}] [--file [FILE]]

options:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -m, --mode {decomment,recomment}
                        select mode of operation (decomment or recomment)
  f, --file [FILENAME]
                        filename or path to the target file

Supported Languages:

• Python-style comments*
• C-style comments: UNSTABLE (see below)

Python-Style Comments

This program assumes that comments adhere to the PEP8 standard for Python comments. This means that comments should follow the # .* pattern. Technically, inline comments should have two spaces between the # and the end of the code, but the decommenter regex does adjust for inlines that do not follow this (the recommenter follows the two-space pattern).

Docstring removal is not implemented at this time. Block comments using ''' or """ is not in adherence to PEP8 (see above) and will not be removed.

*Python-style comments in other languages (e.g. Ruby, Perl, and R) are allowed to run but have not been tested and are therefore not guaranteed to work.

C-Style Comments

Inline and newline C-style comments (i.e. non-block comments) work fine with the code on dev. There is a tenative processor for block comments, but it is unstable and inconsistent. A fix will arrive in the near future (this requires restructuring the entire processor from a line-by-line regex logic to multiline regex logic). If you want to try it out, clone the code on the dev branch.