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How do I use a regular expression to strip C style

Jasmine
Administrator

Mar 15, 2001, 6:02 AM

Post #1 of 1 (20004 views)

How do I use a regular expression to strip C style	Can't Post

How do I use a regular expression to strip C style comments from a file?

While this actually can be done, it's much harder than you'd think. For example, this one-liner

Code

    perl -0777 -pe 's{/\*.*?\*/}{}gs' foo.c

will work in many but not all cases. You see, it's too simple-minded for certain kinds of C programs, in particular, those with what appear to be comments in quoted strings. For that, you'd need something like this, created by Jeffrey Friedl:

Code

    $/ = undef; 
    $_ = <>; 
    s#/\*[^*]*\*+([^/*][^*]*\*+)*/|("(\\.|[^"\\])*"|'(\\.|[^'\\])*'|\n+|.[^/"'\\]*)#$2#g; 
    print;

This could, of course, be more legibly written with the /x modifier, adding whitespace and comments.

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