replace c-style comments with newlines (regexp)

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Fri, 21 Dec 2007 00:00:47 +0000, lex __ wrote:

> I'm tryin to use regexp to replace multi-line c-style comments  (like /*
>  this /n */ ) with /n (newlines). I tried someting like  
> re.sub('/\*(.*)/\*'  , '/n'   , file) but it doesn't work for multiple
> lines.


Regexes won't cross line boundaries unless you make them multiline with 
re.MULTILINE.

Also, I'm no expert on regexes, but it looks to me that your regex is 
greedy. I think you need the non-greedy version, which by memory (and 
completely untested) is something like this:

rx = re.compile('/\*(.*?)/\*', re.MULTILINE)


Have you considered what happens when your C code includes a string 
literal containing '/*'?


"Some people, when confronted with a problem, think “I know, I’ll use 
regular expressions.” Now they have two problems."
-- Jamie Zawinski, in comp.lang.emacs



-- 
Steven.