hardhat-etherscan ignore/skip comments

[derawi]

Is is somehow possible to skip some comments from being uploaded to etherscan, which are for internal use only?

[fvictorio]

Well, that depends a lot on what you are doing. But one idea that comes to mind is using hardhat-preprocessor to eliminate the comments. For example, if you want to erase all the comments that start with // temp: you could install and add the plugin, and put something like this in your config:

  preprocess: {
    eachLine: hre => ({
      transform: line => {
        return line.includes("// temp:") ? line.replace(/\s*\/\/ temp:.*/, "") : line
      }
    })
  }

To be honest, I would avoid doing this, because it could cause some unexpected issues down the line. As a contrived example: if you add a string value that happens to have // temp: inside it, you will get a compilation error (because the string will be erased from the middle). That's a very unlikely thing to happen, but the point is that you could get compilation errors or, worse, unexpected runtime behaviors that are super hard to understand because you are preprocessing the code.

That plugin also has a preprocess task that will modify your contracts in-place. I think this is a bit better: you could do that only before verifying your contracts, manually inspect that everything looks good, verify your contracts and then undo those changes.

I hope that helps!