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Identify first non-comment line in a character vector

Source: R/Functions-Txt.R
skipCommentLines.Rd

Function to identify the index of the first non-comment line in a character vector.

Usage

skipCommentLines(txt, start, comment = "#")

Arguments

txt

  • character vector to search

start

  • index into txt to regard as the start of the search

comment

  • character indicating the following text in the string is a comment

Value

the index of the first line in txt that does not start with a comment character

Details

Each element in txt is regarded as a line of text (as in a text file). The function searches for the first non-comment line and returns its index.

Examples

txt = c("#this is a comment",
        "  #so is this,even thought the line starts with blank space",
        "this is not a comment",
        "this is not either, but the first is line 3.");
extractLines(txt,1); #--should be 3: txt[3] is first non-comment line
#> Error in extractLines(txt, 1): argument "end" is missing, with no default