You say:

OTOH, (6 dashes) is fine,

I did what you told me and took a look at the W3C recommendations and it says:
the string "--" (double-hyphen) MUST NOT occur within comments.
So I think, this should do for a legal comment:
<!--(?:[^-]|-[^-])*-->

s$$([},&%#}/&/]+}%&{})*;#$&&s&&$^X.($'^"%]=\&(|?*{%
+.+=%;.#_}\&"^"-+%*).}%:##%}={~=~:.")&e&&s""`$''`"e

In reply to Re^2: Tokenizing XML by Skeeve
in thread Tokenizing XML by Skeeve

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