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Asked: 2026-05-11T03:26:51+00:00

What’s the best way to remove comments from a PHP file? I want to

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What’s the best way to remove comments from a PHP file?

I want to do something similar to strip-whitespace() – but it shouldn’t remove the line breaks as well.

For example,

I want this:

<?PHP // something if ($whatsit) {     do_something(); # we do something here     echo '<html>Some embedded HTML</html>'; } /* another long comment */ some_more_code(); ?>

to become:

<?PHP if ($whatsit) {     do_something();     echo '<html>Some embedded HTML</html>'; } some_more_code(); ?>

(Although if the empty lines remain where comments are removed, that wouldn’t be OK.)

It may not be possible, because of the requirement to preserve embedded HTML – that’s what’s tripped up the things that have come up on Google.

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1 Answer

  1. I’d use tokenizer. Here’s my solution. It should work on both PHP 4 and 5:

    $fileStr = file_get_contents('path/to/file'); $newStr  = '';  $commentTokens = array(T_COMMENT);      if (defined('T_DOC_COMMENT')) {     $commentTokens[] = T_DOC_COMMENT; // PHP 5 }  if (defined('T_ML_COMMENT')) {     $commentTokens[] = T_ML_COMMENT;  // PHP 4 }  $tokens = token_get_all($fileStr);  foreach ($tokens as $token) {         if (is_array($token)) {         if (in_array($token[0], $commentTokens)) {             continue;         }                  $token = $token[1];     }      $newStr .= $token; }  echo $newStr;
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