Perl regex: how do I combine these 2 regex statements? [closed]

Question

Closed. This question needs to be more focused. It is not currently accepting answers.

---

Want to improve this question? Update the question so it focuses on one problem only by editing this post.

Closed 9 years ago.

Improve this question

I am trying to write a selector which filters out/deletes everything after a comment (#) symbol, but ignores # symbols within strings ("" or '')

So in the below example only the last line would be filtered/deleted

"#dummy comment" asd asd
' abc # dummy comment'
abc #real comment

These are the two regex selectors I have come up with so far(i will add the s/ tag later on):

/('|").*#.*('|")/g        --> selects fake commnts

/#(?!!).+/g   ---> highlights all comments, including above ones (?!! is to ignore #!/usr/bin/env perl ) 

I'm currently struggling to join these two comments to achieve the above result. Ive tried using forward and reverse lookups but cant seem to get this right.Any advice at all would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

What about this simple method?

1. remove all substrings between double or single quotes first
2. extract out substring after a # by a simple regular expression cpature

Here is the test program for your sample input:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;

while (<DATA>) {
    chomp;
    s/['"][^'"]*['"]//g;
    if (m/#(.*)/) {
        print "$1\n";
    }
}

__DATA__
"#dummy comment" asd asd
' abc # dummy comment'
abc #real comment