I think it would be useful for the Find in the IDE to optionally exclude commented out lines in its results. If one selects Exclude comments, any line starting with ’ or // would not show up.
Anyone else think this would be useful? Or, is the feature already there and I don’t know about it?
-Bob
I think that would be counter productive, comments can have some very useful information. I find myself searching for comments sometimes as well.
Tim,
I agree. I also sometimes look for things in comments. The idea is that this is something you could turn on or off as needed. In fact, if you knew something was in a comment, perhaps one could show only comment lines (line starts with ’ or //).
on the subject of comments… would be REALLY REALLY helpful to have BLOCK COMMENTS
/*
my comment
goes on for
a few lines
and I don't want to
comment out
each and every
individual one
*/and don’t bother suggesting I submit a feature request… I gave up on trying to get the feedback system to work long ago
and make them collapsible
That’s one of the first feature requests I made actually, <https://xojo.com/issue/33413>
I was told to select multiple lines and use the comment line function… >_>
Personally I consider a response like that a “cop-out”… Tell us … “No, we won’t implement that, sorry”, or “Its under consideration”, or “Wow, why did we leave that out in the beginning anyways”…
Instead the response is a “band-aid”
If “we” didn’t think it was a beneficial addition (duh almost every other language in existance has /* */), we probably would not have brought it up (sorry didn’t mean to hijack the intent of this thread)
Sort by Type and the Comment results are collected into 1 clump instead of sprinkled throughout.
A regex search for “^[^’//].*test” would at least exclude comments at the start of a line.
You can use a regular expression to exclude comments. For example, this will find an “if” if it’s not in a comment.
^((?!//|').)*\\bif\\bThanks for the regex suggestions. However, I find regex really ugly. (That may be just me.)
-Bob
Well, it ain’t pretty. 
depends on your definition of pretty. I like it. But then again I am not the norm these days. I came from the old school UN*X days where you did RegEx in everything (grep/perl/awk/sed/etc) constantly…
This wouldn’t work as expected since it would exclude any line where a single “/” preceded the search term. Why? Because tokens within a character class are considered individually, so there is no difference between any of these:
[/]
[//]
[////////////////]Each would match a single “/”.
^'// ↩︎
ArchiveXojo is free database tool that acts as a repository of your code. One feature of that database is that you can search your code for strings and exclude comments from the search