Remove all comments from a PHP source file

Question

I would like to remove all comments from a PHP source file from within a VB.NET application. Another stackoverflow question showed how to do this in C# code

I came up with this conversion, but it does not work unfortunately:

Dim blockComments As String = "/\*(.*?)\*/"
Dim lineComments As String = "//(.*?)\r?\n"
Dim strings As String = """((\\[^\n]|[^""\n])*)"""
Dim verbatimStrings As String = "@(""[^""]*"")+"
regex = New Regex(blockComments & "|" & lineComments)
srcT = regex.Replace(srcT, "")

Wheres the problem? What did you try to solve it? What other solutions have you looked at? — dognose, Jun 07 '13 at 09:17
It helps to specify the exact problems you are having, saying "it does not work unfortunately" doesn't give us much information. — Walt Ritscher, Jun 07 '13 at 22:24

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Jun 07 '13 at 15:01

You need to pass the flag RegexOptions.Singleline when constructing the Regex object. Otherwise, the block-comments can't span multiple lines.

regex = New Regex(blockComments & "|" & lineComments, RegexOptions.Singleline)

The . normally matches any character except newline (\n). The RegexOptions.Singleline flag makes it match any character, including newline.

Remove all comments from a PHP source file

1 Answers1