Read a line by characters

[bmerlover]

I'm reading line by line and making comparisons. I have been using the index function but I knew what my substring was. Now I don't know what my substring is. I have an index function searching for ' /* ' and as soon as I see this comment, I want to know if there is anything before it on the line.

For example:

print "hello"; /* prints hello */
 

I'm trying to determine if there is a line of code before the comment starts. Now I have this approach done by searching for a semicolon. Then comparing the index of the semicolon to the index of /* and checking if the index of the semicolon is lower than the the index of the /* which means that there is a line of code. Now I have this problem what if there is no semicolon there such as

print "hello" /* prints hello */
;

This line of code will still execute but I will not know if there is something before the /*. My question is, is there someway of reading the first character in the line and comparing that to / to determine if there is something before the /*

Psuedocode:

if (index($_, "/*"))
{
#now check to see if there is something before it
 
if(first character of line == "/")
{
    print "yes there is something before /* ";
}
 
}
 

Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance. In the meantime I will continue to look for a solution. If I find one, I will post the answer.

[KevinADC]

Since you are really searching for a pattern a regexp is appropriate:

@lines = ('print "hello"; /* prints hello */', 'print "hello";');
foreach my $line (@lines) {
   if ($line =~ m#^.+?/\*.*?\*/#){
       print "There is a comment: $line\n";
   }
   else {
       print "There is no comment: $line\n";
   }
} 
 

I didn't put too much thought into the regexp so it could maybe be improved upon.

[bmerlover]

Thanks a lot for the solution, I looked into it when you gave me the recommendation for the regex. This is the solution I came up with. I strip all the leading whitespaces and check if it's a comment or not. That's how I know it's a line of code. There is one flaw if the comment is before the line of code (/* */ code;) But that's a case that I'm not looking for.

 
s/^\s+//; #strip leading whitespace
 
if(/^[^\/*]/)
{
    $line_count++;
}