Strip Comments from XML

Question

I've encountered the need to remove comments of the form:

<!--  Foo

      Bar  -->

I'd like to use a regular expression that matches anything (including line breaks) between the beginning and end 'delimiters.'

What would a good regex be for this task?

Answer 1

The simple way :

Regex xmlCommentsRegex = new Regex("<!--.*?-->", RegexOptions.Singleline | RegexOptions.Compiled);

And a better way :

Regex xmlCommentsRegex = new Regex("<!--(?:[^-]|-(?!->))*-->", RegexOptions.Singleline | RegexOptions.Compiled);