That's kind of a chicken-and-egg problem, isn't? How can you succesfully remove strings, if you can't detect comments? Consider:

/* One " two */ a = b + 4; /* three " four */
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You have to do it all in one pass. Something like:

s { (     [^"'/]*                          # Not a string, character o
+r comment.
      |  "[^\\"]*(?:\\.[^\\"]*)*"          # String.
      |  '[^\\']*(?:\\.[^\\']*)*'          # Char.
      |  / (?![*])                         # Slash, not a comment.
    )
      |
    ( /[*] [^*]* (?: [*] [^*/]* )* [*]/ )  # Comment.
  }
  { $2 ? "" : $1 }gsex;
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But that isn't fool proof either (consider # define).

Abigail