On Fri, 4 Dec 1998, Jacques Delsemme wrote:

> Comment tags can contain other tags, and your regular expression only 
> removes characters up to the next > (as it should, for all the other 
> tags cannot contain other tags).

	Oh, thanks for the explanation: makes sense.

> There was also an error in the regular expression I provided to remove 
> comments.  It should have a question mark after the .* to match only up 
> to the first -->, that is:
> 
> 	s/<!--.*?-->//gi;

	OK.  Nit: you don't need the 'i'.

> Another glitch I ran into concerns binary files.  ...  Is there an easy way
> to recognize if a file is binary?

	Yes, the Perl -B file test.  (See p. 85 in the Programming Perl
	book, 2nd. ed.)

> It'd be tedious to list all of them (.gif, .jpg, .exe, ...), and filter them
> out before getting the description.

	Wouldn't simply checking the filename extension for /\.txt$/
	work?  You most likely don't want the first 50 words of a
	PostScript file (say) even though a PostScript file is a text
	file.

	- Paul