Frankly, the way to handle this is with a parser -- something that, in effect, marches through character by character, maintains state information, and gives back chunks of the data with categorizations that you want: comment vs. not-comment. (Since it takes two characters to know you've entered or left a comment, the parser needs to know to look for the second character when it sees the first.)

The state information you need to maintain in this case is the alternation among "not-in-comment-or-quote", "in-quote", and "in-comment". You start out in the first of those, and as soon as you enter either of the others (by detecting an open-quote or open-comment), nothing else matters until you detect the character (pair) that takes you out of that state, putting you back to "not-in-comment-or-quote".

So look at Parse::RecDescent -- I suspect that someone has already come up with a parser spec to handle C-like comments.

In reply to Re: need regex help to strip things like embedded C comments by graff
in thread need regex help to strip things like embedded C comments by Eradicatore

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