in reply to Text matching repost

Yes, your regular expression didn't work for me either. I made a regexp that I believe works (below). But, before you use it for real files, try it on some samples to make sure it is doing what you want. Otherwise, you may lose your original c files when you try to change them.
#!/usr/bin/perl use strict; use warnings; open my $fh, "<", 'o33.txt' or die $!; my $cfile = do {local $/; <$fh>}; close $fh or die $!; $cfile =~ s/^[\t ]*reports?\((?s:.*?)\);?[\t ]*\n//gm; print $cfile; __END__ ^[\t ]* optional leading spaces/tabs from beginning of line, ( +the 'm' modifier) reports? reports with the 's' optional \( left paren (?s:.*?) allow '.' to match newline in this scope (between parens) \) closing paren ;? optional ';' [\t ]* optional spaces/tabs \n ends with newline

Chris

Update: added 'tabs' to spaces