Question

I’m looking at trying to strip out C comments from our patch files and have looked at numerous regexes, but if we remove lines from our patches – it would break them.

How would you write a regex or sed command to search diff patch files for comments and replace comment lines with blank spaces.

This works sed regex works for C files, but for patches I need something different:

sed '/^\/\*/,/\*\//d'

An example patch exerpt would be:

@@ -382,7 +391,109 @@
        return len;
 }

+/**********************************************************************************
+ * Some patch
+ * Author: Mcdoomington
+ * Do somethimg
+ * 
+ * fix me
+ **********************************************************************************/

Anyone have ideas?

Edit:

Using this filter:

sed -e 's,^+ \*.*,+ \/\/Comment removed,' mypatch.patch > output


+/**********************************************************************************
+ //Comment removed
+ //Comment removed
+ //Comment removed

How do I add a if line ends with \ to skip it?

Edit: Solution

While not the cleanest way – I used sed with a jury-rigged regex.

sed -e '/[^\*\/]$/{N;s,^+ \* .*,+ \* Comment removed,;}' patch > output
sed -e '/[^\*\/]$/{N;s,^+\\\* .*,+ \/\* Comment removed,;}' patch > output

Note the second command can be a bit too greedy, but for the purposes of sanitizing comments – this works!

How it works:

1.) First command
To determine if this is the end of a comment /[^*/]$/ determines if it is / then {N;s,^+\* .,+ /* Comment removed,;}’ finds +* (whatever) and replaces it with * Comment removed.

2.) Second command
To determine if this is the end of a comment /[^*/]$/ determines if it is / then {N;s,^+\* .,+ /* Comment removed,;}’ finds + * (whatever) and replaces it with * Comment removed.

Answer 1

I just used a quick and dirty hackjob that canned most of the comments using

sed -e '/[^\*\/]$/{N;s,^+ \* .*,+ \* Comment removed,;}' patch > output
sed -e '/[^\*\/]$/{N;s,^+\\\* .*,+ \/\* Comment removed,;}' patch > output