A simple comment build script for Xcode

If you’re a casual coder (like me), you’re code is probably plagued with loads of TODO’s or XXX comments awaiting your attention.

Here’s a small python script which you can add to the xcode build process to consolidate all your code comments into one tidy text file.

You can download it from here

And here’s a quick tutorial on how to get it up and running:

Firstly, make sure you’ve got some TODO or XXX comments in your code.

At the moment the script only looks in .h and .m files, but if you look at the script source, that’s pretty easy to change.

Next up, you’ll need to right click on your target, and select New run script build phase.

Now right click on the new build phase, and select get info.

The inspector window should present itself and you’ll need to change the shell location, and paste in the script contents as shown in the screenshot.

Now just build your application, and you should see a todo.txt file pop up in your project directory. You may want to add that to your project for easy referencing.

If we look at the contents, it should contain a reference to each file, the line number and the comment entered, grouped by TODO’s and XXX’s.

Enjoy!