Regular expression to remove comment

Question

I am trying to write a regular expression which finds all the comments in text. For example all between /* */. Example:

/* Hello */

Answer 1

I encountered this problem several years ago and wrote an entire article about it.

If you don't have access to non-greedy matching (not all regex libraries support non-greedy) then you should use this regex:

/\*([^*]|[\r\n]|(\*+([^*/]|[\r\n])))*\*+/

If you do have access to non-greedy matching then you can use:

/\*(.|[\r\n])*?\*/

Also, keep in mind that regular expressions are just a heuristic for this problem. Regular expressions don't support cases in which something appears to be a comment to the regular expression but actually isn't:

someString = "An example comment: /* example */";

// The comment around this code has been commented out.
// /*
some_code();
// */