Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!mcvax!hp4nl!philmds!leo
From: leo@philmds.UUCP (Leo de Wit)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: not the way ... (was Re: Want a way to strip comments from a)
Message-ID: <981@philmds.UUCP>
Date: 17 Mar 89 19:06:06 GMT
References: <7150@siemens.UUCP> <9900010@bradley> <4221@omepd.UUCP>
Reply-To: leo@philmds.UUCP (Leo de Wit)
Organization: Philips I&E DTS Eindhoven
Lines: 25

In article <4221@omepd.UUCP> merlyn@intelob.intel.com (Randal L. Schwartz @ Stonehenge) writes:
   []
|Nope.  Just try it on the line:
|
|  foo; bar;  /* comment1 */  bletch; /* comment2 */
|
|'bletch;' disappears with the comments.
|
|The regexp that matches comments looks like (in egrep/lex notation):
|
|  [/][*]([*]*[^*/])*[*]+[/]
|
|(I use [X] here instead of \X because I hate backslashes...).
|
|Sed and vi are not powerful enough to eat things like this in one
|regexp.

Sed is often underestimated; it IS powerful enough:

s/\/\*\([^*/]*\*\)\1*\///g

will eat the comments away just nicely (I'll leave the HOW as an
exercise for the reader).

    Leo.