nocomment

Removes comments from source code. The interface follows go fmt: the result goes to standard output, and flags rewrite, diff or list.

Comment-like text inside string literals is kept. A line holding nothing but a comment is removed with its line ending; a line that still holds code keeps its line ending, so lines are never joined.

Build

make generate
go build -o bin/nocomment ./cmd/nocomment

make generate fetches pinned ANTLR grammars and writes lexers under internal/lexer/generated/. They are build artifacts, not version controlled.

Usage

nocomment main.go           # print without comments
nocomment -l src/           # list files that would change
nocomment -d src/main.go    # unified diff
nocomment -w src/main.go    # rewrite in place
nocomment -lang go < main.go

A directory is walked recursively in lexicographic order; dot entries and vendor, node_modules, bin, build, dist, target, scratch and _build are skipped. Only known extensions are processed; a named file always is.

-w	write the result to the source file
-d	display a unified diff
-l	list files whose result differs
-e	report all errors, not only the first
-lang name	force the language
-s pattern	process only names matching a comma-separated glob
-version	print version and build metadata
-h, -help	show usage

-w cannot combine with -d or -l; -d cannot combine with -l. Exit code is 0 on success, 2 on a usage or processing error.

Languages

ANTLR lexers: Go, Java, C, C++, Kotlin, PostgreSQL, SQLite, SQL, TOML, HTML, XML. Delimiter scanner: Python, C#, PHP, Swift, Ruby, Shell, JSONC, YAML, Markdown, JavaScript, TypeScript, Rust, Scala.

Input must be valid UTF-8; a byte-order mark and a leading #! line are preserved. -w writes a temporary file in the target directory and renames it, keeping the file mode, and refuses a read-only file or a symbolic link.

Development

make generate && make corpus
go test ./...