sphinx-copybutton: Is there a way to exclude whole lines from copy?

[kathatherine]

Here's my dilemma. My team is hoping to utilize sphinx-copybutton in our documentation, but we include comments in many of our code blocks. Sometimes a LOT of comments, in order to explain many different parts of a given command. Take this as an example:

.. code-block:: shell

       # Replace <INSTALLER> with the installer you just downloaded
       # Replace <PATH_TO_REPO_FOLDER> with the path to your repository - the default path is /opt/anaconda/repo
       # Replace <FQDN> with your fully qualified domain name
       # Replace <PREVIOUS_INSTALLER> with the location of the previous installer file (where the docker-compose.yml is located)
       bash <INSTALLER>  -- -b <PATH_TO_REPO_FOLDER> -d <FQDN> --upgrade-from ../<PREVIOUS_INSTALLER>

And here's the doc page where this example shows up: https://server-docs.anaconda.com/en/latest/admin/upgrade.html

We're thinking about presenting the information in a different way, outside of the codeblocks, but wanted to check. Is there a way, in the current implementation, to exclude entire lines beginning with # from the copy? I couldn't figure anything out from the documentation. It seems like you can only include lines, or exclude the input prompts at the beginnings of lines.

We considered including a character manually at the beginnings of all lines we want copied out and then utilizing copybutton_prompt_text in the conf.py, but we worry about those who continue to copy the old-fashioned way with the cursor copying the additional character and running into errors that they don't understand.

If anyone knows of an easy solution to excluding based on a starting character, I'd love to hear it. Otherwise, we may need to rethink our codeblock usage so we can utilize the copybutton. Thanks!

[kathatherine]

Just being a good citizen and answering my own question. Got some regex help and the following did the job for us:

copybutton_prompt_text = r"(?!#)"
copybutton_prompt_is_regexp = True

It ensures code block lines beginning with # are not copied, while preserving spaces if we have yaml example text or things of that nature. Works great!