Quick and easy way to remove "dead" (commented out) code

Question

I'm working with an inherited code base which contains thousands of lines of commented out code. I know the previous coder meant to save all his hard work for posterity rather than simply deleting it but: I will never read it and it just gets in the way. One problem example is that when I perform text searches for certain code segments I gets dozens of "false" hits in the commented code. PITA.

Is there a quick/easy way to detect large blocks of commented out code? A clever RegEx perhaps?

I happen to be working in VB.NET at this time and comment character is a single apostrophe.

Answer 1

That's what version control systems are for.

I'd make sure it was under version control (hopefully not Visual Source Safe), check it out, remove all the commented code, and check it back in.

I'd also discourage the practice in your development team for the future.

Answer 2

You can use a Regular Expression search. Search for

^.*'.*$

To find a single line with a comment. You'll probably want to find at least 3 lines that start with a comment:

^.*'.*\n.*'.*\n.*'.*$

Keep the cat away from your keyboard.

Answer 3

I'm afraid I agree with duffymo. I don't think you'll find a reliable automatic way to remove the commented out code. I'm sure if you search hard enough, you'll find one but your time would be better spent on your work.

I've been in this situation in the past (far too often) and what I end up doing is removing the commented out code as I work on various modules.

As an example, I open class Person to make a change and I see commented out code that has yet to be removed. I checkout the code (we use VSS), remove the bad code, check it in and finally, check it out to do my work.

It takes time before it all goes away, but I feel it is an effective use of time to resolve the issue.

Answer 4

I'd suggest writing or finding a macro for Visual Studio that will help delete comments.

Some pseudo-logic:

• start at a line number, read first character. remember this line number.
• if is the VB comment character ', then continue
• read next line's first character. if is comment character, continue.
• when finding a line that isn't a comment character, analyze the number of lines traversed.
• if the number of lines traversed matches your threshold of n, then delete them.

Answer 5

I wonder... does Resharper has some sort of functionality to find code like this?

Answer 6

(^\s*//.*\n)^10

Find 10 concurrent commented out lines of the // style.

Commented out tests:

\s*//\s*\[Test\].*\n