preg_replace out CSS comments?

Question

I'm writing a quick preg_replace to strip comments from CSS. CSS comments usually have this syntax:

/* Development Classes*/
/* Un-comment me for easy testing
  (will make it simpler to see errors) */

So I'm trying to kill everything between /* and */, like so:

$pattern = "#/\*[^(\*/)]*\*/#";
$replace = "";
$v = preg_replace($pattern, $replace, $v);

No dice! It seems to be choking on the forward slashes, because I can get it to remove the text of comments if I take the /s out of the pattern. I tried some simpler patterns to see if I could just lose the slashes, but they return the original string unchanged:

$pattern = "#/#";
$pattern = "/\//";

Any ideas on why I can't seem to match those slashes? Thanks!

Answer 1

Here's a solution:

$regex = array(
"`^([\t\s]+)`ism"=>'',
"`^\/\*(.+?)\*\/`ism"=>"",
"`([\n\A;]+)\/\*(.+?)\*\/`ism"=>"$1",
"`([\n\A;\s]+)//(.+?)[\n\r]`ism"=>"$1\n",
"`(^[\r\n]*|[\r\n]+)[\s\t]*[\r\n]+`ism"=>"\n"
);
$buffer = preg_replace(array_keys($regex),$regex,$buffer);

Taken from the Script/Stylesheet Pre-Processor in Samstyle PHP Framework

See: http://code.google.com/p/samstyle-php-framework/source/browse/trunk/sp.php

csstest.php:

<?php

$buffer = file_get_contents('test.css');

$regex = array(
"`^([\t\s]+)`ism"=>'',
"`^\/\*(.+?)\*\/`ism"=>"",
"`([\n\A;]+)\/\*(.+?)\*\/`ism"=>"$1",
"`([\n\A;\s]+)//(.+?)[\n\r]`ism"=>"$1\n",
"`(^[\r\n]*|[\r\n]+)[\s\t]*[\r\n]+`ism"=>"\n"
);
$buffer = preg_replace(array_keys($regex),$regex,$buffer);
echo $buffer;

?>

test.css:

/* testing to remove this */
.test{}

Output of csstest.php:

.test{}