Is there a way to parse out HTML Comments on the Server side (PHP or MySQL)

Question

We need a way to remove HTML comments when displayed to the user but not to the developer. I'm wondering what the best way to do this is.

Answer 1

Try:

$html = eregi_replace("<!--[^>]*-->", "", $html);

Or using preg_replace, as mentioned below:

$html = preg_replace("/<!--(.|\s)*?-->/", "", $html);

And, yes, either way, comment delimiters embedded in strings will cause problems.

Answer 2

The best would be to use a parser like DOMDocument, traverse the DOM tree and remove all comment nodes. Or you build a parser on your own.

Answer 3

Are you removing comments from your own PHP pages, or from someone else's markup you have in a string?

For the latter, use an HTML parser, as suggested by Gumbo. Don't use regex to parse HTML, because it can't. (I need to bind a hotkey to that sentence. Every third question on SO is trying to parse HTML with a regex. It is not a good idea.)

If you mean the former, just use PHP comments instead of HTML ones and you won't have to do any post-processing:

<?php /* blah */ ?>