What's your opinion RegEx Gurus?

[Ali Eghtebas]

Hi,

I've made this regex to catch the start of a valid multiline comment such as
"/*" in e.g. T-SQL code.
"(?<=^(?:[^'\r]*'[^'\r]*')*?[^'\r]*)(?<!^(?:[^'\r]*'[^'\r]*')*?--.*)/\*.*?$"
With Multiline option on.

As we know the T-SQL single line comment starts with a "--" and the string
character is a "'".
Considering all this, from these lines below the pattern will only catch "/*
D" and "/* E" i.e. they are the only valid start of a multiline comment.
''' /* A
''-- /* B
--'' /* C
'--' /* D
'--''' /* E

Now I'm not really happy with this regex and know there should be a shorter
regex to cover this. But I don't know what else to use. This regex could
actually be shorter IF it was possible to exclude the string "--" right in
the first lookbehind expression like this... look at the 2 "(--)":
(?<=^(?:[^'\r(--)]*'[^'\r]*')*?[^'\r(--)]*)/\*.*?$
But we know that unfortunately you can only exclude single characters in a
[^.] construct, hence the regex above is not correct. (Would be great if we
could use something like [^(--)] some day to exclude "--").

Anyway, what other regex can be used to accomplish the task of this regex?
--
Thanks in advance
Ali Eghtebas Sweden