Trailing Comments
February 23, 2021
Today’s exercise is based on a blog entry that Reddit pointed me to. Sean is trying to write a program that finds lines of code in his Python programs that have trailing comments at the ends of lines, which he considers bad style. His naive program improperly flagged a line as containing a trailing comment when the comment marker is embedded in a quoted string:
x = "# This is fine""This \# is fine too"x = "" # This is not
Sean gets a little bit sidetracked in his blog entry, and never quite solves the problem; I’m not convinced the code he writes is correct (though he seems to think it is), and I’m also not convinced that trailing comments are a bad thing. Nevertheless, the task makes an interesting exercise, especially when we also handle quoted escape sequences.
Your task is to write a program that identifies lines of code with trailing comments. When you are finished, you are welcome to read or run a suggested solution, or to post your own solution or discuss the exercise in the comments below.
Programming Praxis 