Perl regex to find and replace php multiline comments

Question

I am trying to find a way to shrink my PHP/JavaScript code by removing all of my single and multiple line comments. Currently I have the single line removal working but I can not figure out how to make my multiple line comments remove. I have tried the following regular expressions:

\/\*[^\*\/]*\*\/
\/\*[^.\/]*\*\/

And many others. The current expression I am using to find the single lines and failing the multi lines is (\/\/[^\n]*\n|\/\*[^\*\/]*\*\/)

Expression Requirements

The expression must be in Perl
The expression must not stop at // inside the multiline comment (ie. http://url.com)
The expression must be able to find both single and multiline comments
The expression can be used to find the beginning and end of any multiline PHP/JavaScript comment.

A sample of code you can test on that I will need it for can be found here

Thank you in advance.

After the line containing `$(function(){`, there is `/**` which seems out of place? — Jerry, Aug 20 '13 at 17:57
Your single line regex isn't working correctly too as it will match URLs which aren't comments, and will match `//` inside string literals. — Ibrahim Najjar, Aug 20 '13 at 17:59
@Jerry No. It is actually correct. if you look after the socket.onclose closing brace there is a comment closer. — Mic1780, Aug 20 '13 at 18:00
@Sniffer Thank you. You are correct. I will fix that later. Right now im only concerned with the multiline one. — Mic1780, Aug 20 '13 at 18:02
Possibly relevant: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4079920/is-there-a-point-to-minifying-php — AKHolland, Aug 20 '13 at 18:03
That won't be pretty easy. As for multi-line comments @PaulS. solution should work. — Ibrahim Najjar, Aug 20 '13 at 18:04
@AKHolland Thank you for that link. Im not so much worried about minifying the php as I am the JS. — Mic1780, Aug 20 '13 at 18:06
@Mic1780 Why not a pre-built solution such as YUI compressor? — AKHolland, Aug 20 '13 at 18:33
@AKHolland Im not looking for a program to compress anything. I already have a script that pushes a new script to the user, they just are not compressed. Compressing them will be nice because it will save disk space. — Mic1780, Aug 20 '13 at 18:39

score 3 · Accepted Answer · answered Aug 20 '13 at 17:54

3

\/\*[\s\S]*?\*\/

\/\* match /*
[\s\S]*? match anything (non-greedy)
until \*\/; match */

answered Aug 20 '13 at 17:54

Paul S.

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Why wouldn't I use `[.]*?` with dotall on? is \s\S better? – Mic1780 Aug 20 '13 at 19:13
@Mic1780 what I wrote doesn't require any flags so easier to explain. Of course you can do the _dotall_ method. With _dotall_ off you can easily combine this regexp with another that matches to the end of the line, to catch `//` comments too – Paul S. Aug 20 '13 at 20:13

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Aug 20 '13 at 17:53

0

http://www.perl.com/pub/2003/06/06/regexps.html

You're not going to have it work with a dot alone. That excludes the newline character.

You're going to need to use the /s option.

answered Aug 20 '13 at 17:53

Plasmarob

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Oli · Answer 3 · 2013-08-20T19:09:33.777

0

There is an online guide which gives the following perl regex.

(?:\/\*(?:[^*]|(?:\*+[^*\/]))*\*+\/)|(?:\/\/.*)

And it seems to give the correct output with your test code. But you might get into trouble with text like in line #10 where there are comments inside other elements.

edited Aug 20 '13 at 19:09

answered Aug 20 '13 at 19:02

Oli

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Perl regex to find and replace php multiline comments

Expression Requirements

3 Answers3