How can I strip multiline C comments from a file using Perl?

Question

Can anyone get me with the regular expression to strip multiline comments and single line comments in a file?

eg:

                  \" WHOLE         


        

Answer 1

As often in Perl, you can reach for the CPAN: Regexp::Common::Comment should help you. The one language I found that uses the comments you described is Nickle, but maybe PHP comments would be OK (// can also start a single-line comment).

Note that in any case, using regexps to strip out comment is dangerous, a full-parser for the language is much less risky. A regexp-parser for example is likely to get confused by something like print "/*";.