Howto clean comments from raw sql file

Question

I have problem with cleaning comments and empty lines from already existing sql file. The file has over 10k lines so cleaning it manually is not an option.

I have a litt

Answer 1

# Remove comments i.e. lines beginning with whitespace and '--' (using multi-line flag)
re.sub('^\s*--.*\n?', '', query, flags=re.MULTILINE)

Regex string explained:

• ^ start of line
• \s whitespace
• \s* zero or more whitespace characters
• -- two hypens (static string pattern)
• .* zero or more of any characters (i.e. the rest of the line)
• \n newline character
• ? end of string
• flags = re.M is the multiline modifier

"When specified, the pattern character '^' matches at the beginning of the string and at the beginning of each line (immediately following each newline)"

See the Python regular expressions documentation for more details:

https://docs.python.org/3/library/re.html