StripCmt by Ben Canning bdc@bdc.cx http://www.bdc.cx/software/stripcmt/

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StripCmt is a utility for removing comments from C, C++, and Java source code. It was programmed in ANSI-compliant C and has been tested on Linux. StripCmt is free for use and modification under the GNU General Public License (http://www.fsf.org/copyleft/gpl.html).

A note: since 0.1.X is a complete rewrite of the parser, there might well still be some cases that it can't handle. That's why this is still a pre-release. I try to test as many esoteric (and common) cases as possible, but I obviously can't get them all. If you find one, please email me immediately.

0.1.2 is another bugfix release. See CHANGES for info.

0.1.1 is a bugfix (thanks to Kristoffer Nyberg) so StripCmt no longer leaves asterisks inside comments. It's a good thing I declared 0.1.0 a pre-release, huh?

0.1.0 is a complete rewrite of the parser that will make my life a lot easier. It also fixes a few major bugs in the old parse code. A man page has also been added.

Read the file 'CHANGES' for more information.

This file is the only documentation for StripCmt. Sorry.

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Installing StripCmt is easy. Assuming you're under a normal Unix variant, here's the basic steps:

  % gzip -d stripcmt-X.Y.Z.tar.gz
  % tar xf stripcmt-X.Y.Z.tar
  % cd stripcmt-X.Y.Z
  % make

Optionally, you can become root and do a "make install". StripCmt will install itself into /usr/local/bin in that case.

(The 'X', 'Y', and 'Z' are meta-characters for the current version since I'm too lazy to update this file).

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StripCmt is designed as a utility. Thus, it will work in multiple ways. Note that as of version 0.0.5, StripCmt's commandline handling is somewhat incompatible with older versions.

If there are no commandline arguments, StripCmt will read from stdin and output to stdout. This makes it act as a FIFO (First In, First Out) filter.

If there are parameters passed, StripCmt will treat them as filenames (unless they are one of the ones listed below) and process each of them (by which I mean it will remove the comments). Normal operation is to put one filename on the commandline and use redirection to write it to a file. If there are multiple filenames, StripCmt will go through each of them and show the results to stdout, which will result in the files being concatenated together.

The only special commandline parameters that StripCmt understands are:

-h --help       Show a commandline help screen and exit
   --version    Show current version and exit

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Java comments are the exact same as C and C++ comments except they have added a "/** ... */" block. Luckily, our C comment parsing code will catch that, so I am able to say this removes Java comments without actually having to code anything more.

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As you can see from the version number, StripCmt still hasn't had a full release. This is a fully functional program with no bugs that I'm aware of, but it's not complete. I don't have any specific plans to add features, so this might well be the final release (although I have a tendency to say that and then add useless features).

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As noted, this program is available at no cost. I'd really like it if you told me what you thought of it, though.

  bdc@bdc.cx
  http://www.bdc.cx/

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