Regex and multiline replacement pattern, take 2

[gacaccia]

so i've basically got a code file with comments where i want to remove the comments using a regular expression. the comments are identified with /* and */, which can span multiple lines. the final solution from a prior post was to use:

[Regex]::Replace("/\*.*?\*/","")

unfortunately, the result from this removes all new line characters in the code file. i'm not sure if this is an issue with powershell. i tried this pattern on a regexp test web site (non-powershell code) and the results it provided retained new line characters for non-comment sections. any thoughts?

thanks,

glenn

 

[gacaccia]

found a solution.

$OFS = "`r"
$fileContent = get-content $codeFileName
$fileContent = [Regex]::Replace("/\*.*?\*/","")
$fileContent = $fileContent.Split("`r")

my understanding is that regex collapses the array of strings from get-content into a single string. by setting $OFS to insert a return character after each array element at time of collapse, you can then recreate the array after the replace by splitting the string back out to the individual elements as delimited by the return character.