Comment Stripping and Compression

Comment Stripping & Compression 🧹

Export2AI can reduce exported text size, but both options trade away readability. They are off by default so code review and AI agent handoff preserve full source context.

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Two Separate Features

Setting	Default	What it does	Token impact
export2ai.removeComments	false	strips language comments by file extension/syntax family	may reduce tokens, but removes rationale
export2ai.compressCode	false	trims lines and removes blank lines	may reduce tokens, but removes layout
export2ai.compressionLevel	9	compresses the zip file bytes	does not reduce tokens after extraction

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Recommendation

Use case	Recommended settings
AI debugging	keep comments and formatting
security review	keep comments and formatting
architecture review	keep comments and formatting
minimal context upload	consider comment stripping only after reviewing tradeoffs
generated code archive	compression may be acceptable

Default review-quality profile:

{
  "export2ai.removeComments": false,
  "export2ai.compressCode": false
}

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Comment Stripping Behavior

Export2AI uses language-aware rules selected by file extension or special filename. The stripper is string-aware where possible, so it tries not to remove comment markers inside strings.

Supported syntax families include common forms such as:

Syntax family	Examples
C-style line/block	JavaScript, TypeScript, C, C++, C#, Java, Go, Rust, Swift, Kotlin
Hash comments	Python, shell, Ruby, YAML, TOML, Dockerfile-style files
SQL comments	-- and block comments
HTML/XML comments	<!-- -->
CSS comments	/* */
PowerShell	# and <# #>
Batch/CMD	REM, ::
Lua	--, --[[ ]]
Lisp-like	;

The read-only export2ai.commentStripLanguages setting is generated at build time from commentProfiles.ts.

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Files That Stay Unchanged

Some file types are intentionally skipped or should not be treated as comment-strip targets:

File type	Reason
Markdown	prose and code fences can contain comment-like text
plain JSON	comments are not valid JSON; content should remain exact
unknown extensions	no safe syntax profile
exact single-file copy	Copy Content to Clipboard does not run the export processing pipeline

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Compression Behavior

export2ai.compressCode applies simple whitespace compaction:

1. split content by line
2. trim each line
3. drop empty lines
4. join with \n

This can make code harder to read and can damage formatting-sensitive examples. Use it only when upload size or context size matters more than exact layout.

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Zip Compression Is Different

export2ai.compressionLevel controls only the zip archive byte size.

Setting	Meaning
0	faster, larger zip
9	smaller upload, default

This does not reduce LLM tokens after the archive is extracted by a tool. Token count depends on the text content, not the compressed zip byte count.

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Known Limitations

• Comment stripping can have edge cases in regex literals, nested strings, unusual heredocs, or mixed embedded languages.
• Comments may contain important instructions, warnings, generated-code notes, or architecture rationale.
• Compression removes blank-line structure that human reviewers and AI agents may use for orientation.

For best AI code review quality, leave both removeComments and compressCode off.