Pattern to match multiline strings

[Srikanth Madasu]

Hi all,
I am writing a program to delete all the comments from a given java file.

I was able to remove the single line comments using pattern - Pattern p= Pattern.compile("//(.)*");

But matching multiline comments is getting trickier.
I am using - Pattern p= Pattern.compile("/\\*.*\\*/", Pattern.DOTALL); - Basically match anything between /* and */ and include new lines.

But If I have something like below, it is matching this entire thing as a single match and I am losing the code between the comments.
/**
*comment1
*/
codeline1
line2
/**
*comment2
*/

Could some one help me how to rewrite this pattern so that I dont delete the code between the comments?

Thanks in advance.

[Henry Wong]

Srikanth Madasu wrote:
I am writing a program to delete all the comments from a given java file.

I was able to remove the single line comments using pattern - Pattern p= Pattern.compile("//(.)*");

But matching multiline comments is getting trickier.
I am using - Pattern p= Pattern.compile("/\\*.*\\*/", Pattern.DOTALL); - Basically match anything between /* and */ and include new lines.

But If I have something like below, it is matching this entire thing as a single match and I am losing the code between the comments.
/**
*comment1
*/
codeline1
line2
/**
*comment2
*/

Could some one help me how to rewrite this pattern so that I dont delete the code between the comments?

The easiest option is to use a reluctant qualifier.

Henry

[Srikanth Madasu]

Thanks Henry.

It worked. Just changed pattern to include reluctant quantifier "?" .

Thanks!