I was wondering about the Visual Studio line counting and why what I was seeing wasn't what was being reported. So I wrote a small C# console program to count pure lines of code and write the results to a CSV file (see below).
Open a new solution, copy and paste it into the Program.cs file, build the executable, and then you're ready to go. It's a .Net 3.5 application. Copy it into the topmost directory of your code base. Open a command window and run the executable. You get two prompts, first for name of the program/subsystem, and for any extra file types you want to analyze. It then writes the results to a CSV file in the current directory. Nice simple thing for your purposes or to hand to management.
Anyhoo, here it is, FWIW, and YMMV:
using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Text;
using System.Text.RegularExpressions;
using System.IO;
namespace CodeMetricsConsole
{
class Program
{
// Concept here is that the program has a list of file extensions to do line counts on; it
// gets any extra extensions at startup from the user. Then it gets a list of files based on
// each extension in the current directory and all subdirectories. Then it walks through
// each file line by line and will display counts for that file and for that file extension.
// It writes that information to a CSV file in the current directory. It uses regular expressions
// on each line of each file to figure out what it's looking at, and how to count it (i.e. is it
// a line of code, a single or multi line comment, a multi-line string, or a whitespace line).
//
static void Main(string[] args)
{
try
{
Console.WriteLine(); // spacing
// prompt user for subsystem or application name
String userInput_subSystemName;
Console.Write("Enter the name of this application or subsystem (required): ");
userInput_subSystemName = Console.ReadLine();
if (userInput_subSystemName.Length == 0)
{
Console.WriteLine("Application or subsystem name required, exiting.");
return;
}
Console.WriteLine(); // spacing
// prompt user for additional types
String userInput_additionalFileTypes;
Console.WriteLine("Default extensions are asax, css, cs, js, aspx, ascx, master, txt, jsp, java, php, bas");
Console.WriteLine("Enter a comma-separated list of additional file extensions (if any) you wish to analyze");
Console.Write(" --> ");
userInput_additionalFileTypes = Console.ReadLine();
// tell user processing is starting
Console.WriteLine();
Console.WriteLine("Getting LOC counts...");
Console.WriteLine();
// the default file types to analyze - hashset to avoid duplicates if the user supplies extensions
HashSet allowedExtensions = new HashSet { "asax", "css", "cs", "js", "aspx", "ascx", "master", "txt", "jsp", "java", "php", "bas" };
// Add user-supplied types to allowedExtensions if any
String[] additionalFileTypes;
String[] separator = { "," };
if (userInput_additionalFileTypes.Length > 0)
{
// split string into array of additional file types
additionalFileTypes = userInput_additionalFileTypes.Split(separator, StringSplitOptions.RemoveEmptyEntries);
// walk through user-provided file types and append to default file types
foreach (String ext in additionalFileTypes)
{
try
{
allowedExtensions.Add(ext.Trim()); // remove spaces
}
catch (Exception e)
{
Console.WriteLine("Exception: " + e.Message);
}
}
}
// summary file to write to
String summaryFile = userInput_subSystemName + "_Summary.csv";
String path = Directory.GetCurrentDirectory();
String pathAndFile = path + Path.DirectorySeparatorChar + summaryFile;
// regexes for the different line possibilities
Regex oneLineComment = new Regex(@"^\s*//"); // match whitespace to two slashes
Regex startBlockComment = new Regex(@"^\s*/\*.*"); // match whitespace to /*
Regex whiteSpaceOnly = new Regex(@"^\s*$"); // match whitespace only
Regex code = new Regex(@"\S*"); // match anything but whitespace
Regex endBlockComment = new Regex(@".*\*/"); // match anything and */ - only used after block comment detected
Regex oneLineBlockComment = new Regex(@"^\s*/\*.*\*/.*"); // match whitespace to /* ... */
Regex multiLineStringStart = new Regex("^[^\"]*@\".*"); // match @" - don't match "@"
Regex multiLineStringEnd = new Regex("^.*\".*"); // match double quotes - only used after multi line string start detected
Regex oneLineMLString = new Regex("^.*@\".*\""); // match @"..."
Regex vbaComment = new Regex(@"^\s*'"); // match whitespace to single quote
// Uncomment these two lines to test your regex with the function testRegex() below
//new Program().testRegex(oneLineMLString);
//return;
FileStream fs = null;
String line = null;
int codeLineCount = 0;
int commentLineCount = 0;
int wsLineCount = 0;
int multiLineStringCount = 0;
int fileCodeLineCount = 0;
int fileCommentLineCount = 0;
int fileWsLineCount = 0;
int fileMultiLineStringCount = 0;
Boolean inBlockComment = false;
Boolean inMultiLineString = false;
try
{
// write to summary CSV file, overwrite if exists, don't append
using (StreamWriter outFile = new StreamWriter(pathAndFile, false))
{
// outFile header
outFile.WriteLine("filename, codeLineCount, commentLineCount, wsLineCount, mlsLineCount");
// walk through files with specified extensions
foreach (String allowed_extension in allowedExtensions)
{
String extension = "*." + allowed_extension;
// reset accumulating values for extension
codeLineCount = 0;
commentLineCount = 0;
wsLineCount = 0;
multiLineStringCount = 0;
// Get all files in current directory and subdirectories with specified extension
String[] fileList = Directory.GetFiles(Directory.GetCurrentDirectory(), extension, SearchOption.AllDirectories);
// walk through all files of this type
for (int i = 0; i < fileList.Length; i++)
{
// reset values for this file
fileCodeLineCount = 0;
fileCommentLineCount = 0;
fileWsLineCount = 0;
fileMultiLineStringCount = 0;
inBlockComment = false;
inMultiLineString = false;
try
{
// open file
fs = new FileStream(fileList[i], FileMode.Open, FileAccess.Read, FileShare.ReadWrite);
using (TextReader tr = new StreamReader(fs))
{
// walk through lines in file
while ((line = tr.ReadLine()) != null)
{
if (inBlockComment)
{
if (whiteSpaceOnly.IsMatch(line))
{
fileWsLineCount++;
}
else
{
fileCommentLineCount++;
}
if (endBlockComment.IsMatch(line)) inBlockComment = false;
}
else if (inMultiLineString)
{
fileMultiLineStringCount++;
if (multiLineStringEnd.IsMatch(line)) inMultiLineString = false;
}
else
{
// not in a block comment or multi-line string
if (oneLineComment.IsMatch(line))
{
fileCommentLineCount++;
}
else if (oneLineBlockComment.IsMatch(line))
{
fileCommentLineCount++;
}
else if ((startBlockComment.IsMatch(line)) && (!(oneLineBlockComment.IsMatch(line))))
{
fileCommentLineCount++;
inBlockComment = true;
}
else if (whiteSpaceOnly.IsMatch(line))
{
fileWsLineCount++;
}
else if (oneLineMLString.IsMatch(line))
{
fileCodeLineCount++;
}
else if ((multiLineStringStart.IsMatch(line)) && (!(oneLineMLString.IsMatch(line))))
{
fileCodeLineCount++;
inMultiLineString = true;
}
else if ((vbaComment.IsMatch(line)) && (allowed_extension.Equals("txt") || allowed_extension.Equals("bas"))
{
fileCommentLineCount++;
}
else
{
// none of the above, thus it is a code line
fileCodeLineCount++;
}
}
} // while
outFile.WriteLine(fileList[i] + ", " + fileCodeLineCount + ", " + fileCommentLineCount + ", " + fileWsLineCount + ", " + fileMultiLineStringCount);
fs.Close();
fs = null;
} // using
}
finally
{
if (fs != null) fs.Dispose();
}
// update accumulating values
codeLineCount = codeLineCount + fileCodeLineCount;
commentLineCount = commentLineCount + fileCommentLineCount;
wsLineCount = wsLineCount + fileWsLineCount;
multiLineStringCount = multiLineStringCount + fileMultiLineStringCount;
} // for (specific file)
outFile.WriteLine("Summary for: " + extension + ", " + codeLineCount + ", " + commentLineCount + ", " + wsLineCount + ", " + multiLineStringCount);
} // foreach (all files with specified extension)
} // using summary file streamwriter
Console.WriteLine("Analysis complete, file is: " + pathAndFile);
} // try block
catch (Exception e)
{
Console.WriteLine("Error: " + e.Message);
}
}
catch (Exception e2)
{
Console.WriteLine("Error: " + e2.Message);
}
} // main
// local testing function for debugging purposes
private void testRegex(Regex rx)
{
String test = " asdfasd asdf @\" adf ++--// /*\" ";
if (rx.IsMatch(test))
{
Console.WriteLine(" -->| " + rx.ToString() + " | matched: " + test);
}
else
{
Console.WriteLine("No match");
}
}
} // class
} // namespace
Here's how it works:
- the program has a set of the file extensions you want to analyze.
- It walks through each extension in the set, getting all files of that type in the current and all subdirectories.
- It selects each file, goes through each line of that file, compares each line to a regex to figure out what it's looking at, and increments the line count after it figures out what it's looking at.
- If a line isn't whitespace, a single or multi-line comment, or a multi-line string, it counts it as a line of code. It reports all the counts for each of those types of lines (code, comments, whitespace, multi-line strings) and writes them to a CSV file. No need to explain why Visual Studio did or did not count something as a line of code.
Yes, there are three loops embedded in each other (O(n-cubed) O_O ) but it's just a simple, standalone developer tool, and the biggest code base I've run it on was about 350K lines and it took like 10 seconds to run on a Core i7.
Edit: Just ran it on the Firefox 12 code base, about 4.3 million lines (3.3M code, 1M comments), about 21K files, with an AMD Phenom processor - took 7 minutes, watched the performance tab in Task Manager, no stress. FYI.
My attitude is if I wrote it to be part of an instruction fed to a compiler, it's a line of code and should be counted.
It can easily be customized to ignore or count whatever you want (brackets, namespaces, the includes at the top of the file, etc). Just add the regex, test it with the function that's right there below the regexes, then update the if statement with that regex.
