toggle-comment

toggle-comment is a utility designed around setting or toggling the line-comment status of lines in plain text files in a do-what-I-mean fashion. It aims for muscle-memory compatibility with GNU sed.

Examples

$ cat > example.py <<'EOF'
def greet(name):
    # Give salutations
    return f'Hello, {name}!'

print(greet('world'))
EOF
$ toggle-comment '/def/,/return/' example.py
# def greet(name):
#     # Give salutations
#     return f'Hello, {name}!'

print(greet('world'))
$ toggle-comment '1,3' example.py | toggle-comment '4,5!'
def greet(name):
    # Give salutations
    return f'Hello, {name}!'

print(greet('world'))

Caveats

• Regular expression syntax matches the Rust regex crate. Notable differences are in the (lack of) escapes for special characters, e.g. /a|b/ vs /a\|b/
• Currently unsupported features include:
  • in-place editing of files;
  • multiple file arguments;
  • POSIX sed M~N "step-wise" patterns, e.g. 1~3 matching lines 1, 4, 7...;
  • GNU sed addr,~N "up-to-multiple", e.g. 10,~7 matching lines 10-14; and
  • non-slash regular expression delimeters, e.g. \|http://| (initial backslash followed by delimiter);