str.startswith() not working as I intended

Question

I can\'t see why this won\'t work. I am performing lstrip() on the string being passed to the function, and trying to see if it starts with \"\"\". For some reason, it gets caug

Answer 1

As long as lines start or end with a comment, the code below should work.

However, keep in mind that the docstrings can start or end in the middle of a line of code.

Also, you'll need to code for triple single-quotes as well as docstrings assigned to variables which aren't really comments.

Does this get you closer to an answer?

def count_loc(infile):
  skipping_comments = False
  loc = 0 
  for line in infile:
    # Skip one-liners
    if line.strip().startswith("#"): continue
    # Toggle multi-line comment finder: on and off
    if line.strip().startswith('"""'):
      skipping_comments = not skipping_comments
    if line.strip().endswith('"""'):
      skipping_comments = not skipping_comments
      continue
    if skipping_comments: continue
    print line,