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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-13T01:32:55+00:00

I want to match multiline comments that contain a specific word, let’s say findthis

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I want to match multiline comments that contain a specific word, let’s say findthis. The first pattern that comes to mind is \/\*.*?findthis.*?\*\/ (using DOTALL). The problem with this pattern however is that a string like this:

/* this is a comment */
this is some text
/* this is a findthis comment */

will match the whole text. Basically, on a bigger file, the first match would contain everything from the first comment to the first comment containing findthis. How can I prevent this?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Well, you could change the regex to something like \/\*([^*]|\*+[^/*])*findthis([^*]|\*+[^/*])*\*+\/ but…

    To get this exactly right, you would have to fully tokenize the source code. Otherwise your regex will be fooled by comment-like content inside strings (among other bizarre corner cases).

    (Explanation of crazy regex: ([^*]|\*+[^/*]) matches a little bit of the inside of a comment, but never matches all or part of */.)

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