The rule to check if the selected file contains a comment with the selected pattern or a legal header. In the second option, it looks for word copyright in the first 5 lines of the file. The rule works differently than other rules, because it doesn't use AST representation of the checked code but operates directly on the file which contains the code.

The syntax in a configuration file is:

[ruleType] ?not? comments [checkType] [patternOrFileName]

• ruleType is the type of rule which will be executed. Proper values are: check, search, count and fix. For more information about the types of rules, please refer to the program's documentation. Check type will raise an error if there is a comment with the selected pattern (if pattern is checked) or there is no legal header in the code. Search type will list all comments which violates any of checks or raise an error if nothing found. Count type will simply list the amount of the comments which violates the checks. Fix remove the comment with the selected pattern from the code or add the selected legal header from file. In any other setting, the fix type will execute the default shell command set by the program's setting fixCommand.
• optional word not means negation for the rule. Adding word not will change to inform only about the comments which not violate the check.
• comments is the name of the rule. It is case-insensitive, thus it can be set as comments, comments or --cOmMeNtS--.
• checkType is the type of check to perform on the code's comments. Proper values are: pattern and legal. Pattern will check all the comments in the code against regular expression. Legal will check if the source code file contains legal information header.
• patternOrFileName parameter depends on the type of check. For pattern type it is a regular expression against which the comments will be checked. For legal type, it is the path to the file which contains the legal header, which will be inserted into code. Thus, in that situation, the parameter is required only for fix type of the rule. The file containing the legal header should contain only text of the header without comment marks. They will be added automatically by the rule.

Disabling the rule

It is possible to disable the rule for a selected part of the checked code by using pragma ruleOff: "comments" in the element from which the rule should be disabled or in code before it. For example, if the rule should be disabled for procedure proc main(), the full declaration of it should be:

proc main () {.ruleOff: "comments".}

To enable the rule again, the pragma ruleOn: "comments" should be added in the element which should be checked or in code before it. For example, if the rule should be re-enabled for const a = 1, the full declaration should be:

const a {.ruleOn: "comments".} = 1

Examples

1. Check if there is a comment which starts with FIXME word:

   check comments pattern ^FIXME

2. Add a legal header from file legal.txt:

   fix comments legal legal.txt