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

You haven't provided and exit path from the recursive loop. A return statement should do the trick.

    (...)
    while True:
        if line.rstrip().endswith('"""'):
            line = infile.readline()
            return find_comment(infile, line)
        else:
            line = infile.readline()

Answer 2

not line_t.startswith('"""') or not line_t.startswith('#')

This expression evaluates to True no matter what string line_t denotes. Do you want 'and' instead of 'or'? Your question isn't clear to me.

Answer 3

while True is an infinite loop. You need to break once you're done.

Answer 4

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,

Answer 5

if not line_t.startswith('"""') or not line_t.startswith('#'):

This if will always be satisfied -- either the line doesn't start with """, or it doesn't start with # (or both). You probably meant to use and where you used or.