What is the regular expression to delete HTML comments?

Question

I need to remove several thousand comments from an HTML document. The comments are in this form (multi-line):

<p>some HTML</p>
<!--
  FOO
  BAR
  BLAH
-->
<p>more HTML</p>

What regular expression can I use in a find/replace to return this result:

<p>some HTML</p>
<p>more HTML</p>

duplicate possible http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-open-tags-except-xhtml-self-contained-tags/1732454#1732454 — KJYe.Name, Mar 11 '11 at 15:27

Stephen Chung · Answer 1 · 2011-03-11T16:02:55.450

1

If you only want to remove comments in this particular format (and leave all other comments intact):

replace(/^<\!--.*?-->$/mg, "")

The .*? is non-aggressive match. "m" flag necessary to make it multi-line (so ^ and $ will match the beginning/end of lines respectively).

If you want to remove all comments:

replace(/<\!--.*?-->/g, "")

edited Mar 11 '11 at 16:02

answered Mar 11 '11 at 15:28

Stephen Chung

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You don't need to escape `-` (except in `[]`) – SLaks Mar 11 '11 at 15:30
Thanks. :-) Sometimes I forget which characters need escaping where, so just escape them all... Edited answer. – Stephen Chung Mar 11 '11 at 15:31

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Mar 11 '11 at 15:31

1

If you have Dreamweaver, the "Clean Up HTML/XHTML" command has an option to remove Non-Dreamweaver comments. That should take care of a problem like this very easily.

answered Mar 11 '11 at 15:31

Surreal Dreams

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I know I asked for a regex, but this was actually the fastest and easiest solution. – user2393462435 Mar 14 '11 at 01:05

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Mar 11 '11 at 15:26

0

You shouldnt use Regex for this. Try the HTML agility pack instead.
HTML Agility Pack

answered Mar 11 '11 at 15:26

SecretDeveloper

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What is the regular expression to delete HTML comments?

3 Answers3