Regex to strip single comments and muti-line comments in Notepad++

Question

the followings :

// comments

/****** comments *******/

is it possible to have a regex for them ?

What about a line like `a = "This is // not a comment"`? Does the language you're using `/* allow /* nested */ comments */`? Are you aware that regular expressions in Notepad are line-based, so if comments span more than one line, it gets difficult? — Tim Pietzcker, Oct 30 '11 at 09:34
more importantly i wanna capture _/* this */_ and replace it with blanks. — revo, Oct 30 '11 at 09:47
What happens if you have /* in a string? It's not a comment. It's not possible to work with comments in a regex, it's beyond the abilities of it. — Ariel, Oct 30 '11 at 09:50

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Oct 30 '11 at 10:07

2

As the comments say, its not possible to strip comments in a correct way with regexes. But maybe its still enough for you to use the following regular expressions:

^\s*//.*$
/\*.*?\*/

answered Oct 30 '11 at 10:07

morja

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This will fail on multi-line comments. – Tim Pietzcker Oct 30 '11 at 10:20
tnx but first regex works, second fails! – revo Oct 30 '11 at 11:40
`/\*.*\*/` (edited) works for one line comments. but for multiples ? no option ? – revo Oct 30 '11 at 11:43
@Mohammad You could make it work.. But what about Tim's questions? You can't have a 100% coverage with regexes here. – FailedDev Oct 30 '11 at 12:03
@FailedDev %100 coverage doesn't matter, no way for multiple lines ? – revo Oct 30 '11 at 12:29
See Narendra's answer for a workaround for the multiline problem. – morja Nov 01 '11 at 15:37
remove the `^` and it will work for comments on the same line as code like `someFunction(foobar); //pass foobar to some funciton` – r3wt Jan 17 '15 at 14:35

Narendra Yadala · Answer 2 · 2011-10-30T12:58:37.543

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You can do this with a simple hack. Select Extended mode and then replace all \r\n with a character/character-sequence that does not occur in your file and that which will match .*. Now change back to Regular Expression mode and apply the regular expression (given by morja) to do your replace. Now replace back the special character/character-sequence with \r\n.

edited Oct 30 '11 at 12:58

answered Oct 30 '11 at 12:47

Narendra Yadala

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FailedDev · Answer 3 · 2011-10-30T13:22:30.597

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@Mohammad Currently you cannot do this (match multiline) in Notepad++.

This is because matching newlines is possible in Extended search mode, and regular expressions are available in Regexp search mode.

You could however combine different steps and do what you want as pointed by other answers.

edited Oct 30 '11 at 13:22

answered Oct 30 '11 at 13:03

FailedDev

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score -2 · Answer 4 · edited Aug 18 '12 at 10:11

-2

The easiest solution is not to use regex from Notepad++, you sould only export as rtf (plugins --> nppexport --> export to RTF) then open with Microsoft Word or other that support format searching, so with that feature you can search and replace the green values only.

I hope it helps.

edited Aug 18 '12 at 10:11

The iOSDev

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answered Aug 17 '12 at 18:33

ahonig

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Regex to strip single comments and muti-line comments in Notepad++

4 Answers4