RegExp to strip HTML comments

Looking for a regexp sequence of matches and replaces (preferably PHP but doesn't matter) to change this (the start and end is just random text that needs to be preserved).

IN:

fkdshfks khh fdsfsk 
<!--g1-->
<div class='codetop'>CODE: AutoIt</div>
<div class='geshimain'>
    <!--eg1-->
    <div class="autoit" style="font-family:monospace;">
        <span class="kw3">msgbox</span>
    </div>
    <!--gc2-->
    <!--bXNnYm94-->
    <!--egc2-->
    <!--g2-->
</div>
<!--eg2-->
fdsfdskh

to this OUT:

fkdshfks khh fdsfsk 
<div class='codetop'>CODE: AutoIt</div>
<div class='geshimain'>
    <div class="autoit" style="font-family:monospace;">
        <span class="kw3">msgbox</span>
    </div>
</div>
fdsfdskh

Thanks.

Solution 1:

Are you just trying to remove the comments? How about

s/<!--[^>]*-->//g

or the slightly better (suggested by the questioner himself):

<!--(.*?)-->

But remember, HTML is not regular, so using regular expressions to parse it will lead you into a world of hurt when somebody throws bizarre edge cases at it.

Solution 2:

preg_replace('/<!--(.*)-->/Uis', '', $html)

This PHP code will remove all html comment tags from the $html string.

Solution 3:

A better version would be:

(?=<!--)([\s\S]*?)-->

It matches html comments like these:

<!--
multi line html comment
-->

or

<!-- single line html comment -->

and what is most important it matches comments like this (the other regex shown by others do not cover this situation):

<!-- this is my blog: <mynixworld.inf> -->

Note

Although syntactically the one below is a html comment your browser might parse it somehow differently and thus it might have a special meaning. Stripping such strings might break your code.

<!--[if !(IE 8) ]><!-->