Sublime Forum

Deleting all lines that are comments in a file

#1

So I have a huge configuration file.

How do I remove all lines in the file that start with

These lines starting with ## are all comments and not required in the file.

0 Likes
#2

Well, your example text seems not to have posted so I’m only guessing, but I think a regex find adn replace would probably work out okay. Maybe try something like ^\s*##.*\n and replace with nothing?

0 Likes
#3

Works thank you
can you explain me this expression? and can you refer me to a doc for this?

0 Likes
#4

Sure. First it’s regular expression language. There are a lot of documents out there on it. I think the ones I found most useful were the Python Regular Expression HOWTO document. Also the website http://regex101.com lets you do a lot of experimenting.

For this expression it’s pretty easy to break it down.

  • ^ – Means we want to start this match at the beginning of a line.
  • \s* – Means we will match any amount of whitespace (in case you have a comment line that is indented a little) and the * means we will grab it ALL.
  • ## – This is the text you’re looking for and it’s prepending a whole line.
  • .* – The . matches any character and * means grab it all.
  • \n – Up to the newline.

Regular expressions are a pretty deep well to jump into but very rewarding and useful when you get the swing of it. And I’m hardly particularly good at it, hence using regex101.com a lot to experiment and see how things work out in practice. Hope that helps!

3 Likes