Regex for comments in strings, strings in comments, etc

by

I’ve broken the regex into 4 lines corresponding with the 4 paths in the graph, don’t keep those line-breaks in there if you ever use this.

(['"])(?:(?!\1|\\).|\\.)*\1|
\/(?![*/])(?:[^\\/]|\\.)+\/[igm]*|
\/\/[^\n]*(?:\n|$)|
\/\*(?:[^*]|\*(?!\/))*\*\/

Regular expression visualization

Debuggex Demo

This code grabs 4 types of “blocks” that can contain the other 3. You can iterate through this and do with each one whatever you want or discard it because it’s not the one you wanna do anything to.

This one is specific for JavaScript as it’s a language I’m familiar with. But you could easily adapt this to the language of your preference.

Anyone see a way in which this code breaks?

Edit I have since been notified that the general pattern is described very well here: https://stackoverflow.com/a/23589204/2684660, neato!

More Related Contents:

  1. RegEx for Multi-Words Without Numbers and Any Special Characters
  2. Regex to match string containing two names in any order
  3. Regular expression to find URLs within a string
  4. Replace single backslash in R
  5. Regex how to match an optional character
  6. Remove all special characters from a string in R?
  7. Create new column in dataframe based on partial string matching other column
  8. Regular expression to match last number in a string
  9. R/regex with stringi/ICU: why is a ‘+’ considered a non-[:punct:] character?
  10. Regular expression – starting and ending with a character string
  11. Regex number between 1 and 100
  12. Select rows from data.frame ending with a specific character string in R
  13. Regex not operator
  14. Regular Expression Match to test for a valid year
  15. Find numbers after specific text in a string with RegEx
  16. What is a regex to match ONLY an empty string?
  17. R split on delimiter (split) keep the delimiter (split)
  18. Find the location of a character in string
  19. Is there an R function to escape a string for regex characters
  20. Regular Expression Vs. String Parsing
  21. How can I match a string with a regex in Bash?
  22. Regex empty string or email
  23. Regular expression to find two strings anywhere in input
  24. Remove square brackets from a string vector
  25. When is it best to use Regular Expressions over basic string splitting / substring’ing?
  26. Overlapping matches in R
  27. Replace string only once with php preg_replace
  28. Remove all characters before a period in a string
  29. How to measure similarity between strings?
  30. Why is this regex allowing a caret?

Leave a Comment