Notepad++ multiline regex

Question

I\'ve got hundreds of files of the type linked here: http://pastebin.com/fGgLfZf8

But I want to remove all the comments that occupies more than one line eg.

Answer 1

<!--[*a-zA-Z\r\n]*-->

this one seems to only take multi-line comments in notepad++

Edit: little mistake : spaces are a problem with this one. You can try <!--[\r\n]{1}[* a-zA-Z\r\n]*-->

Answer 2

This expression <!--.+?(?<=[\*\r\n])--> matched the multi-line comments only in Notepad++ as well.

Answer 3

Next to the "Regular expression" selection in "Search Mode" there is a "matches newline" checkbox (according to @glatapoui it should be noted that this only works in Notepad++ v6, not in previous versions).

Answer 4

Another way to catch multi-line text is use the expression:

<!---([\S\s]+?)--->

\S+ matches all no-space symbols,
\s+ matches all space symbols (including \r \n \t).

It works for notepad++, maybe, otherwise too...

EDIT: At the first look I didn’t noticed that problem issue is catch and delete only multiline comments excluding monoline ones. I found method of two iterations. First we need to find and replace by nothing following text

<!—-(?:(?!.*—->)[\s\S]+?—->|)

That will catch all multiline comments and prefixes of monoline ones. Then we need is bring back the monoline prefixes, that we lost:

Find:
(.+—->)

Replace:
<!—-\1

It will fix monoline comments. Combination of “—->“ can not appear xml code otherwise end of comment.