Note that if, for example, you are processing C source code, then all of the methods presented so far can make mistakes. For example, using them on this:

int fun( char *string )
{
    // Check string/*string for validity:
    if(  NULL != string  &&  '\0' != *string  ) { /* Okay! */
        static char *punct= "!@#-+/*.,;";
        /* Strip some punction characters: */
        stripchars( string, punct );
        ....
[download]

will strip some important stuff that isn't comments! To deal with such problems gets pretty close to writing a parser so you might want to consider Parse::RecDescent (which may even come with an example grammar that parses C).

Alternately, you can write your own parser that understands just a few things like C strings, C++-style comments, and, of course, C-style comments and work your way along. Sorry, I'm not going to try to throw a working version of that together right here, nor am I going to track one down for you (though I expect this has been written more than once so you can probably find one if you are good at searching).

I just didn't want you to get caught by surprise on this.

        - tye (but my friends call me "Tye")