Multi-line regex search in whole file

Question

I\'ve found loads of examples on to to replace text in files using regex. However it all boils down to two versions:
1. Iterate over all lines in the file and apply regex to

Answer 1

Regex is not the way to go, especially not with these large amounts of text. Create a little parser of your own:

• read the file line by line;
• for each line:
  • loop through the line char by char keeping track of any opening/closing string literals
  • when you encounter '/*' (and you're not 'inside' a string), store that offset number and loop until you encounter the first '*/' and store that number as well

That will give you all the starting- and closing-offset numbers of the comment blocks. You should now be able to replace them by creating a temp-file and writing the text from the original file to the temp file (and writing something else if you're inside a comment block of course).

Edit: source files of 2GiB??