Either way, can someone help me regarding the regex for the removal of comments without removing urls?

See How to ask better questions using Test::More and sample data

use strict;
use warnings;

use Test::More;

my @cases = (
    { in => 'http://etc...', out => 'http://etc...' },
    { in => 'foo//bar',      out => 'foo'           },
);

plan tests => scalar @cases;

for my $t (@cases) {
    my $have = $t->{in};
    $have =~ s#(?<!http:)//.*$##;
    is $have, $t->{out}, "$t->{in} correctly processed";
}
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