Regex pattern for c style comments

Today, I am going to discuss my attempts to parse c style comments.

For example,

//This is a comment<br></br>

** /***This is also<br></br> *** a comment ***/ **

Initially, I came up with a regex for /…/ style comments :
<strong>/*.**/</strong>
Well, the above expression was not able to parse comments like:

<br></br>
/*** This is a comment ***/<br></br>```

I googled and came across [http://ostermiller.org/findcomment.html](http://ostermiller.org/findcomment.html) where I found the regex:  
`<strong>/*(.|[rn])*?*/</strong>`  
 This was able to match comments like the above one. But it’d also match the following /*…*/ comments which are not really comments:  

s = “This is a string: /* with a comment /”;

//comment1 /

foo();

//comment2 */

```

I then worked on a regex for //… style comments: //[^n]*n

Then I combined the two regexes by or and my regex pattern becomes:

<strong>//[^n]*n|/*(.|[rn])*?*/</strong>

Now, this pattern is able to search for both: //… and /…/ style comments and avoid matches for patterns like:

<br></br>
//comment1 /*<br></br>
foo();<br></br>
//comment2 */```

One caveat that remains is the /*…*/ pattern in  
`s = "This is a string: /* with a comment */";`  
 getting matched. If any one has a work around this issue, please comment.

I hope this helps.