[Tutor] Need help with multi-line regex identification

[Tony Cappellini]

I'm writing a program to give me a listing of function definitions in 
source files, for an in-house programming language.
The language is very much like C (in the sense of that it has macros, which 
work *almost* the same as C functions)

a macro in this language is declared as

macro MyMacroName // this is the beginning of the macro

// this is the body of the macro

integer X;

        X=X+1
        print"X=" X
// this is the body of the macro

emacro // this is the end of the macro


Some macro files have 20 or more macro definitions, and often there are 10 
or more macro files in one program.
So it's very convenient to have a program to list all of the macros in the 
source files.

With any program development, code doesn't always work the first time, and 
some macros are commented out.
With this in mind, I don't want macros that are commented out to be found 
by my "macro listing program"

This language uses both C and C++ style comments.
I'm new to regex's, but I've come up with the regex below to find the 
beginning of a macro definition.

re.compile(r"""^ *[MACRO]+[ \t]+[a-zA-Z0-9]+""", re.IGNORECASE)


The regex below

re.compile(r"""^ *//""")

I use to find a macro definition, that has been commented out, by a 
C++-style comment.


Now for the real problem
I don't want my macro lister program, to find macro definitions that are 
inside of a multi-line C-style comment.
That is


/*
macro MyMacro

*/

or this

/*
macro MyMacro */

or this


/*
macro MyMacro *
/

should be IGNORED by my program, but I don't know how to do this with regex.
(or any variation of the above C-style multi-line comment)
.
Obviously, this can be done without regexs, but I think the resulting code 
could be shortened significantly by
using regexs

Could someone help point me in the right direction for this ?



thanks



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