HTML Comment Question Options

[ACB]

I have a question regarding an HTML comment.
I visited http://htmlhelp.com/reference/wilbur/misc/comment.html and understand the rules about hyphens, but I have a question about empty comments.
<!> is a valid comment, but is something such as <!<example> valid?
This type of comment is being auto generated on occasion and is causing some trouble for my HTML comment removal script.

Thank you for your help.

[Darin McGrew]

No, <!<example> is not a valid comment.

The easy rule is in the FAQ entry:

An HTML comment begins with "<!--", ends with "-->", and does not contain "--" or ">" anywhere in the comment.

If you want to get technical, then as the HTML comments page of our Wilbur (HTML 3.2) guide explains:

A comment declaration starts with <!, followed by zero or more comments, followed by >. A comment starts and ends with "--", and does not contain any occurrence of "--".

So <!> is a valid comment. But anything other than whitespace between the ! and the > must be a comment, which means it starts with -- and ends with -- and doesn't contain any other --

<! --<example--> would be a valid comment. But without any -- before and after, <!<example> is not a valid comment.

[ACB]

Thank you for your response.