Think I've got it... 
while ($_ = <STDIN>)
  {
    chomp;
    s/^((([^\#\\])|(\\.))*)\#.*$/$1/;
    print "$_\n";
  }

[download]
Seems to do the trick, assuming record delimiters in STDIN are correctly set. Basically, the regexp matches anything that isn't a comment or a quote character, *or* anything that's a quote character followed by anything. Because perl is greedy, this matches up to the first unquoted comment character, and we just substitute away anything after that...
I think substituting out the quotes themselves requires another s/// statement, but it's fairly trivial ;-)

In reply to Re: quoting characters by ahunter
in thread quoting characters by WHolcomb

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