not the way ... (was Re: Want a way to strip comments from a)

[Randal L. Schwartz @ Stonehenge]

In article <9900010 at bradley>, brian at bradley writes:
| >                          Does anyone have a sed or awk script which we
| > can use to preprocess the C source and get rid of all the comments before
| > sending it to the compiler?
| 
|   The following works in vi: :%s/\/\*.*\*\///g
| 
|   I don't know if it will work in sed, but it should...

Nope.  Just try it on the line:

  foo; bar;  /* comment1 */  bletch; /* comment2 */

'bletch;' disappears with the comments.

The regexp that matches comments looks like (in egrep/lex notation):

  [/][*]([*]*[^*/])*[*]+[/]

(I use [X] here instead of \X because I hate backslashes...).

Sed and vi are not powerful enough to eat things like this in one
regexp.

Didn't we just go through this about nine months ago? :-)
(And didn't I give the wrong answer at least twice? :-) :-)
-- 
Randal L. Schwartz, Stonehenge Consulting Services (503)777-0095
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