Question

I would like to remove text between “–” and “\cr”.

I’m actually reading out of a file and if the file has a “–” in it, it should remove the “–” along with whatever everything until the “\cr”.

I am reading the file line by line.

using (StreamReader readFile = new StreamReader(filePath))
{
    string line;

    while ((line = readFile.ReadLine()) != null)
    {
    }
}

Ive tried using a substring to look for the characters

line.Substring(line.IndexOf("--"),line.IndexOf("\cr"));

But I am having a problem looking for the delimiters on each line

I was thinking about writing something like this

while ((line = readFile.ReadLine()) != null)
{
    if (line.Substring(line.IndexOf("--")) // If it has "--"
    {
      //Then remove all text from between the 2 delimiters

    }
}

Please help

Thanks

EDIT:

Problem solved, although I have come across another problem, I am unable to remove comments between /* */ as the comments occur on multiple lines. So I need to remove all text between /* */.

Any suggestions or help?
Thanks

Answer 1

A simple solution would be to just use a regex replace on the line:

line = Regex.Replace(line, @"--.*$", "");

This assumes that whatever you mean with \cr is the actual end of the line (which isn’t included anyway if you read it with ReadLine()), so this removes everything from -- until the end of the line instead.

To replace /* ... */ comments too you may use:

line = Regex.Replace(line, @"--.*$|/\*.*?\*/", "");

Quick PowerShell test:

PS> $a = 'foo bar','foo bar -- some comment','foo /* another comment */ bar'
PS> $a -replace '--.*$|/\*.*?\*/'
foo bar
foo bar
foo  bar