How do i exclude comments from ack results?

Question

Hi im new to ack (actually started half an hour ago). Im impressed by the quality of the search results.

But in my source files there are a lot of comments and if i search for a class/function-name i get about 20 results with commented lines and 2 with the actual code.

Is there a way to exclude text after // and # or between /* */?

Answer 1

You could skip single line comments with something like this;

# ignore matches after //
ack '^[^//]*word'
# ignore matches after #
ack '^[^#]*word'

If you are using ag instead, remember that it does multi-line matches:

# ignore matches after //
ag '^[^\n\r//]*word'
# ignore matches after #
ag '^[^\n\r#]*word'