Line counting C++

Question

I\'m working with this peace of that count the logical lines in a program, omitting comments and black lines. The counting line is working, but I don\'t know how to omit the com

Answer 1

I think your methodology is...flawed.

Consider a line like:

int x = 1;    // starting from 1 because [some reason]

As your code stands right now, it counts only as a non-comment line. As you've described what you'd like to do, it would count only as a comment line.

In reality, tThis contains both code and a comment, so you'd normally want to count it as both code and comment, not just one or the other.

Doing this job well is decidedly non-trivial. Obvious problems you encounter are:

1. a string that contains something that looks like a comment
2. line continuation
3. trigraphs
   • Can hide line continuation
   • Can create a false comment delimiter
4. Multi-line C-ctyle comments
5. #ifs, #ifdefs, etc.

There are probably more issues than that (though are just what occurred to me immediately), but those should be enough to give at least a general flavor.

Bottom line: I think to get very far with this (at all) you're doing to at least need a reasonably complete/accurate C++ lexer. You probably don't need a full parser, but I think any attempt that doesn't use a full C++ lexer s almost certain to fail, probably quite badly and quite frequently.