Remove comments in hive query (and optionally do clean formatting)

gistfile1.txt

#Requires sqlparse library to be installed
import sqlparse
def remove_hive_comments( query, format = False):
    if format is True:
        qry = sqlparse.format(query, reindent=True)
    new_qry = '''
    '''
    for line in iter(qry.splitlines()):
        index = line.find('--')
        line1 = line
        if index is not -1:
            line1 = line[0:index]
        new_qry = new_qry + line1 + '\n'