Several years ago--while building several large, multi-file applications--I found myself getting unwanted output scrolling to my command window. Clearly, I had omitted some line-terminating semicolons somewhere in my morass of code. Finding these instances was tedious and time-consuming (and a task that MLINT now makes trivially easy).

I decided to write a function to detect missing semicolons, but quickly found that coding to ignore comments was beyond my capacity--at least at the time.

Fortunately, Peter Acklam (whom you may know as a frequent contributor to the fine CSSM newsgroup, and as a MATLAB vectorization guru), came to my rescue and, in response to my queries, posted his Comment-Stripping Toolbox.

I haven't had to use my missingsemicolons function in quite a while, but every now and then I still have occasion to strip comments from some MATLAB code. And when I do, I still turn to Peter's submission.

The Comment-Stripping Toolbox allows you to strip comments from a string, or from a file specified by name or by file I.D. One of the things that impressed me the most about Peter's submission was that it reflected his mastery of regular expressions:

If you ever need to strip comments, or just want to see some impressive code, try out Peter's file, and let us know about it here.

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Published with MATLAB® 7.8