Thanks for your reply. So I guess that Regexp::Common::comment doesn't have this out of the box? The reason I looked at using it was because I was under the apprehension that its purpose was to stop us reinventing the wheel and it also handled edge cases - i.e. it just did things right. If all it's doing is recognising comment characters, does it serve any purpose? I'm not trying to be critical, I'm just trying to understand what it was hoping to achieve

Um, that's weird, did you see what the docs say?

Looks to me like it does the job it promises to do ... its not a language parser like PPI, its parts you can use to build a language parser