Regex to strip HTML comments

[redwhiteandblue]

Trying to strip HTML comments from a web page, someone else must have done this.

I'm using

$page = preg_replace('/<!--(.|\s)*?-->/', '', $page

which works most of the time but sometimes causes an error. Is there a more reliable one?

[miXXXture]

http://php.net/manual/en/function.strip-tags.php

[redwhiteandblue]

Originally Posted by miXXXture

http://php.net/manual/en/function.strip-tags.php

Nope, I don't want to strip all HTML tags - ONLY the HTML commented code (<!-- and --> and everything in between pairs of these).

[fris]

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

instead

[redwhiteandblue]

Originally Posted by fris

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

instead

Tht's probably what I started with but surely will just catch everything between the first opening comment tag and the last closing one?

[cyco_cc]

Originally Posted by redwhiteandblue

Tht's probably what I started with but surely will just catch everything between the first opening comment tag and the last closing one?

No, the '?' part makes it non-greedy so it will match the first closing.

Edit: When is your regex breaking? The /<!--(.|\s)*?-->/ one?

[Tom_PM]

I was looking all through my old scripts for that to help you, but I think you've got it now.

[redwhiteandblue]

Originally Posted by cyco_cc

Edit: When is your regex breaking? The /<!--(.|\s)*?-->/ one?

Don't know, on most pages it happily strips out comments but on some it just returns null and I haven't figured out what the difference is with those pages yet.

EDIT just spotted this comment in the PHP user manual:

"As a pertinent note, there's an issue with this function where parsing any string longer than 94326 characters long will silently return null. So be careful where you use it at. "

Could be it.