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Re: Remove comments between delimitersby swiftone (Curate) |
on Sep 20, 2002 at 13:24 UTC ( [id://199460]=note: print w/replies, xml ) | Need Help?? |
First, do you realize that your <> regex may not work as intended if you have nested or broken pairs? For example:
<This works> <<This will break>> <<As will this>
Second, I'm not sure I understand your question. Are you trying to remove
/*This*/ Assuming the latter, s/\*[^*]*\*//g should do what you want. The trick is that in a matched pair (<>) you can use the presence of a starting tag (<) to stop a greedy match from eating the rest of your regexp. In an unmatched pair (*foo*) a greedy regexp will consume everything until the final matching element. So we switch to non-greedy matching with a dot star, or greedy without consuming our match (the [^*]) I hope that answers your question.
Update: Death to Dot Star! is an excellent discussion of greediness, the greedy dot-star, and why non-greediness isn't always the best solution.
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