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Is there a mechanism to comment out large blocks of Python code?
Right now, the only ways I can see of commenting out code are to either start every line with a #, or to enclose the code in triple quotes: """.
The problem with these is that inserting # before every line is cumbersome and """ makes the string I want to use as a comment show up in generated documentation.
After reading all comments, the answer seems to be "No".
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Unlike other programming languages Python doesn't support multi-line comment blocks out of the box. The recommended way to comment out multiple lines of code in Python is to use consecutive # single-line comments. This is the only way to get “true” source code comments that are removed by the Python parser.
A comment in Python starts with the hash character, # , and extends to the end of the physical line. A hash character within a string value is not seen as a comment, though. To be precise, a comment can be written in three ways - entirely on its own line, next to a statement of code, and as a multi-line comment block.
If you select a block of code and use the key sequence Ctrl+K+C, you'll comment out the section of code.
The leading characters // are added to the beginning of each line when commenting one or more lines of code. You can also block comment multiple lines of code using the characters /* */ .
Python does not have such a mechanism. Prepend a # to each line to block comment. For more information see PEP 8. Most Python IDEs support a mechanism to do the block-commenting-with-hash-signs automatically for you. For example, in IDLE on my machine, it's Alt+3 and Alt+4.
Don't use triple-quotes; as you discovered, this is for documentation strings not block comments, although it has a similar effect. If you're just commenting things out temporarily, this is fine as a temporary measure.
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