Revise the extract Variables () function (see Section 2.2) to remove the rows in men Tables that are blank. In addition, eliminate the rows that begin with a ‘*' or a ‘#'. You may find the following regular expression helpful for locating blank rows in a table
The pattern uses several meta characters. The ^ is an anchor for the start of the string, the $ anchors to the end of the string, the [[:blank:]] denotes the equivalence class of any space or tab character, and * indicates that the blank character can appear 0 or more times. All together the pattern ^[[:blank:]]*$ matches a string that contains any number of blanks from start to end.