Re: Three-Line service comments

[Mark . Burgess]

On  3 Aug, Adrian Phillips wrote:
>>>>>> "Tim" == Tim Auckland <Tim.Auckland@Procket.com> writes:
> 
>     Tim> Please could you give me an example?  I've tried just
>     Tim> embedding $(n) in a search string or regexp and it doesn't
>     Tim> seem to help.
> 
>     Tim> I'm trying to delete the three lines:
> 
>     Tim> # # GNATS #
> 
>     Tim> This doesn't find any matches: DeleteLinesContaining "#$(n)#
>     Tim> GNATS$(n)#"
> 
>     Tim> This matches, but only deletes one line out of the three:
> 
>     Tim>       DeleteLinesMatching "(#$(n))*# GNATS($(n)#)*"
> 
> I tried this myself and couldn't get it to work, so I checked the
> source and it seems to be that all of these matching routines match
> against each individual line which of course means that multi-line
> matches can't work, but its quite likely that I'm missing
> something. Mark ?
> 
> Sincerely,
> 
> Adrian
> 


The routines generally match single lines, but you could
possibly do some kind of begin-end construction which
would do it. But....

A piece of advice from a lazy person: I would never
consider doing someting this complex. Why not use a
simple protocol for your comments

# (special char)
# (special char)  My comment
# (Special char)

e.g.

# ftp
# ftp  Start my favourite thingy with ftp..
# ftp

ftp ....

Now it is trivial to delete all lines starting "# ftp .*" or "ftp.*"
When it comes to automation, human aesthetics are seldom practical.

Mark

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