Question

Is there an easy way to remove comments from a C/C++ source file without doing any preprocessing. (ie, I think you can use gcc -E but this will expand macros.) I just want the source code with comments stripped, nothing else should be changed.

EDIT:

Preference towards an existing tool. I don’t want to have to write this myself with regexes, I foresee too many surprises in the code.

Answer 1

Run the following command on your source file:

gcc -fpreprocessed -dD -E test.c

Thanks to KennyTM for finding the right flags. Here’s the result for completeness:

test.c:

#define foo bar
foo foo foo
#ifdef foo
#undef foo
#define foo baz
#endif
foo foo
/* comments? comments. */
// c++ style comments

gcc -fpreprocessed -dD -E test.c:

#define foo bar
foo foo foo
#ifdef foo
#undef foo
#define foo baz
#endif
foo foo