[plug] Another perl question...

[David Buddrige]

Hi all, 

I am writing a program which will re-arrange a doc++ comment. 

A doc++ comment is a C/C++ comment that starts with an extra "*".  An 
example of a doc++ comment is this: 

/**
 @doc Some general info about a function.
 @precondition Any precondition that the function has
 @postcondition Any postcondition that the function has.
*/ 

 

I want to have all of my doc++ comments formatted so that the start comment 
"/**" is on a line by itself, and each @entry is on a line by itself. 

At the moment, I have some doc++ comments that are like this: 

/** @doc 

This is some general info about a function 

@precondition 

This is info about a precondition.
*/ 

I would like to re-arrange this comment so that it looks like this: 

/**
 @doc This is some general info about a function
 @precondition This is info about a precondition.
*/ 

To do this, I have written the following function: 

# This subroutine takes as input a single array reference, and
# rearranges any doc++ commands that are split over multiple lines so
# that each doc++ command is on a line of its own, including the /** and
# */ delimiters which indicate the start and end of a doc++ comment. 

sub format_docpp_comment
{
   my $doc_comment_array;
   my $comment_line;
   my $single_comment_line; 

   $doc_comment_array = $_[0]; # give a friendly name to the array 

   foreach $comment_line ( @$doc_comment_array )
   {
   #chomp $comment_line;
   my $temp_string;
   $temp_string = $comment_line;
   chomp $temp_string;
   $single_comment_line .= $temp_string;
   } 

   # At this point we have a single string that contains our entire
   # doc++ comment. We can now use simple pattern matching to parse
   # it. 

   $single_comment_line =~ m"(\/\*\*)(([\t\n 
]*)(\@)(doc|invariant|return|precondition|postcondition)([\t\n\w\.\ ]+))+";
   print "2: $2\n";
} 

 

At this point, the $2 variable has within it, the very first doc++ style 
comment which is usually: 

   @doc some text. 

I want to get at the rest of the repeated @somecommand doc++ commands. 

Does anyone know how this is done? 

I kind'of want to store what I have already matched in $2 to some scalar, 
and then delete that part of the string matched so far, so that I can repeat 
the pattern match for the next chunk.  However I am not sure how to proceed. 

thanks 

David.