Regular Expressions Cookbook, 2nd Edition

9.9. Remove XML-Style Comments

Problem

You want to remove comments from an (X)HTML or XML document. For example, you want to remove development comments from a web page before it is served to web browsers, or you want to perform subsequent searches without finding any matches within comments.

Solution

Finding comments is not a difficult task, thanks to the availability of lazy quantifiers. Here is the regular expression for the job:

<!--.*?-->

Regex options: Dot matches line breaks

Regex flavors: .NET, Java, XRegExp, PCRE, Perl, Python, Ruby

That’s pretty straightforward. As usual, though, JavaScript’s lack of a “dot matches line breaks” option (unless you use the XRegExp library) means that you’ll need to replace the dot with an all-inclusive character class in order for the regular expression to match comments that span more than one line. Following is a version that works with standard JavaScript:

<!--[\s\S]*?-->

Regex options: None

Regex flavor: .NET, Java, JavaScript, PCRE, Perl, Python, Ruby

To remove the comments, replace all matches with the empty string (i.e., nothing). Recipe 3.14 lists code to replace all matches of a regex.

Discussion

How it works

At the beginning and end of this regular expression are the literal character sequences ‹<!--› and ‹-->›. Since none of those characters are special in regex syntax (except within character classes, where hyphens create ranges), they don’t need to be escaped. That just leaves the ‹.*?› or ‹[\s\S]*?› in the middle of the regex to examine ...