How to match non-enquoted things?

Question

I have the following RegEx to remove commentary from a PHP file: %/\*.*?\*/%s

The side effect is, that on use of glob like glob($basedir . '/*') it starts removing everything midcode...

So how do I tell the regex to not match when there are quotes in front of it or behind it?

Use `preg_match` to find if there's any occupancy of "there are quotes in front of it or behind it" and cast it in boolean and use in `if-else statements`. First idea what came in my mind after reading this — Leri, Jul 17 '12 at 10:27
This is nontrivial because you could certainly also have quotes inside comments, and then things get hairy pretty rapidly. This means that any regex-based solution will be suboptimal - in essence you need a complete PHP language parser and use that to identify comments correctly. — Tim Pietzcker, Jul 17 '12 at 10:28
This can't be done except in the simplest cases. Most probably, **only PHP** can parse PHP (due to regexes and other non-trivial constructs). For Perl, this has [been proven some time ago](http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=663393). — rubber boots, Jul 17 '12 at 11:25
Seems to match **[this question](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/503871/best-way-to-automatically-remove-comments-from-php-code)**. — rubber boots, Jul 17 '12 at 11:31

score 1 · Accepted Answer · edited Jun 30 '13 at 15:35

1

Try this :

%[^'"]{1}/\*.*?\*/[^'"]{1}%s

It include not simple or double quote before /* and after */

edited Jun 30 '13 at 15:35

Cobra_Fast

answered Sep 19 '12 at 08:02

Zepekigno

1 Answers1