Regular expression for using * with /* and */ to delete comments

[englocon]

Hello All,

Does anyone know what the regex in the replace function in UltraEdit 16.30 should be to delete comments from a file that start with /* and end with */? I tried "/***/" (without quotes) and it did not work.

Thanks

[bulgrien]

With a Perl regular expression, you can do it this way:

(?s)/\*.*\*/

\* matches an asterisk. Since * is a special character, the \ is needed to escape the special functionality and match the actual character.

.* matches everything in between. The . is a wildcard that matches any character. The * says to match as many characters as it can find. By default, the . wildcard doesn't match end-of-line characters and thus will only match characters within a single line.

(?s) is a special switch that tells the regex engine that the . wildcard character should also match end-of-line characters.

[englocon]

Thanks, bulgrien.