Feature #1: Remove Comments
Understand and implement comment removal in C++ source code. This lesson teaches you to detect and eliminate both inline and block comments, handling nesting rules, and maintain code integrity for compiling. You'll learn to process code line by line and character by character to filter out comments and produce clean output.
We'll cover the following...
Description
The first functionality we will be building will remove comments from a piece of code prior to its compilation. There are two types of comments in the C++ language, inline comments and block comments.
- Inline comment: The string
//is used for an inline comment, which means that the characters to the right of//in the same line should be ignored. - Block comment: The block comment is enclosed between the non-overlapping occurrence of
/*and*/. Everything inside these delimiters is ignored. Here, occurrences happen in reading order, meaning line by line from left to right. Note that the string/*/does not yet end the block comment because the ending would be overlapping the beginning.
Note: If two comments are nested, the first effective comment takes precedence over others. In other words, if the string
//occurs in a block comment, it is ignored. Similarly, if the string/*occurs in a line or block comment, it is also ignored. For example:
// this is an inline /* comment *//* this is a /* // block comment */
When ...