DavidFerrington seems to be looking for a form of macro processor. Other replies give good regex solutions to the OPer's problem in terms of its narrow definition in the OP. However, these solutions seem fragile in that they may need substantial revision when faced with new or expanded requirements (which, as we know, always appear).

Then why not use a macro processor, e.g., m4 or cpp, either invoked from Perl or from the command line? The OPer may be working under Windows, but I'm sure versions could be found for this OS (cpp used to be a pretty standard C compiler utility).

Update: Changed m4 and cpp above into man page links.

In reply to Re: assertions help by AnomalousMonk
in thread assertions help by DavidFerrington

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