Removal of ";" from statements ;; in C

Question

I need to remove ";" from statements in C which have ";;". Eg:

main()
{
    int i;;
    int j,k;;
    int l;
    for(i=0;i<10;;)
    {}
}

should become:

main()
{
    int i;
    int j,k;
    int l;
    for(i=0;i<10;;)
    {}
}

Answer 1

Consider using Find & replace command. Any decent text editor has one (Notepad++, KWrite, not to mention Emacs). Search for ;; and replace it with ;.

If you have plenty of code and ; can happen inside char* values, use regexp :)

EDIT: Fine, you should search for: ;; *\n and then replace it with ;\n.

Answer 2

UltraEdit could be a good choice..

Answer 3

My first answer was wrong because I missed the ;; in the head of the for loop, which does serve a purpose.

The following perl script will replace all ;; followed by whitespace with a single ;. It will do that for all C files (file extension .c) in the current directory and its subdirectories.

 perl -i -p -e 's/;;(\s*)$/;$1/g' `find | grep .c`

Thanks to Sean Bright for fixing my original mistake. (See the comments.)

I just want to point out that the extra ; at the end of line shouldn't really present a problem. You could just leave them there, or you could just use your text editor to search and replace the ones that are extraneous.