Shell script: # followed by non-whitespace may or may not be comment

[J-Siu]

Version 1.13.1

When Remove All Comments, following line (from p10k.zsh):

(( $#branch > 32 )) && branch[13,-13]="…"  # <-- this line

becomes:

(( $

The correct outcome should be:

(( $#branch > 32 )) && branch[13,-13]="…"

Additional information:

1. In shell script(posix), if # immediately followed by non-white-space, it may or may not not be comment.
2. Complexity of shell script:

   # Following line does not contain comment
   cat file | grep -v -e ^# -e ^$
   # Following line is partial comment
   cat file | grep -v -e ^# -e ^$ ### This part is a comment
   

[rioj7]

@J-Siu I have tried these strings in VSC and found that syntax highlighting correctly detects the comments and command arguments.

I have looked a the TextMate Grammar and it is not easy to filter these # characters.
It looks like it has transformed a grammar for bash to a collection of begin-end regex and specify which non-terminals are possible after this begin, if non matches any more it must find the end.

If I read the TextMate Grammar correct it also accepts // as single line comment.

[J-Siu]

@rioj7 Understand. I think unless you can leverage some existing tool like "shell syntax", "shell format", or some parsing library, it will be very complicated.

One no so ideal workaround is add a "Remove All Single Line Comments", which ignore in-line comments, and add full support of shell script in future.

[rioj7]

@J-Siu I can make the lines that have the first non whitespace a # the comment lines

[J-Siu]

@rioj7 I actually see there is a "Remove All Single Line Comments" already. So the workaround already exist. Not sure why I missed it before🤦‍♂️

[rioj7]

@J-Siu A Single Line Comment is a comment that starts and ends on the same line, all comments with # in bash are single line comments. I have to define the comments with a regex to get the required behavior.

[J-Siu]

@rioj7 Yes. "Remove All Single Line Comments" currently also remove in-line comments.

[rioj7]

@J-Siu in v1.13.2 I have set that only lines starting with # are removed

[J-Siu]

@rioj7 "Remove All Single Line Comments" is working correctly now.