CODEWITHSUNDEEP
regex
Zack Mullaly
Zack Mullaly

Reputation: 15

Regex to match everything before two forward-slashes (//) not contained in quotes

I've been grappling with some negative lookahead and lookbehind patterns to no avail. I need a regex that will match everything in a string before two forward slashes, unless said characters are in quotes.

For example, in the string "//this is a string//" //A comment about a string about strings, the substring "//this is a string//" ought to be matched and the rest ignored. As you can see, the point is to exclude any single-line comments (C++/Java style). Thanks in advanced.

Upvotes: 1

Views: 1485

Answers (3)

bluepnume
bluepnume

Reputation: 17128

Here you go:

^([^/"]|".+?"|/[^/"])*

Upvotes: 2

bluepnume
bluepnume

Reputation: 17128

A python/regex based comment remover I wrote a while back, if it's helpful:

def remcomment(line):
  for match in re.finditer('"[^"]*"|(//)', line):
    if match.group(1):
      return line[:match.start()].rstrip()
  return line

Upvotes: 0

hochl
hochl

Reputation: 12930

How about

\/\/[^\"']*$

It will match // if it is not followed by either a " or a '. It's not exactly what you requested, but closely meets your requirements. It will only choke on comments that contain " or ', like

// I like "bread".

Maybe better than no solution.

Upvotes: 1

Related Questions