Exercise: Eliminate Empty/Comment-Only Lines

Write a program distill.py that takes a filename from the commandline.

• Open that file for reading

• Output (to stdout) every line that …

  • … is not empty (i.e., does not entirely consist of whitespace)

  • … does not entirely consist of a Python style comment (and is otherwise empty)

Example

distill-test.txt

# whole-line comment
visible content     # though with a comment
		
the previous line contains two TAB characters
      starts at column >0, but is visible

the previousline is entirely empty

         # comment

$ python distill.py distill-test.txt
visible content     # though with a comment
the previous line contains two TAB characters
      starts at column >0, but is visible
the previousline is entirely empty

Dependencies