HTML comments within comments?
Solution 1
I think the key point is this:
Note that comments are markup.
http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/intro/sgmltut.html#h-3.2.4
This is not valid markup:
<div <span/> />
... so neither is the one you mention.
Since all my sites are written in PHP I normally comment out code with PHP comments:
<?/*?>
<div>...</div>
<p>...</p>
<?*/?>
Perhaps you can use a similar trick.
Solution 2
No. Comments cannot be nested and HTML has only one style of comment.
Solution 3
If you're really stuck with some piece of HTML – pre-rendered at some uncontrollable source – which contains comments, and you need to make sure none of it is rendered on your page, you can always wrap it with a script
tag like below, only thing is, you can't comment out script
tags this way.
<html>
<head>
</head>
<body>
<!-- multiline "comment" below using script type="text/html" -->
<script type="text/html">
Hello world!
<!-- Look at me, I'm a comment :) -->
<div>Yeah, whatever, I'm an element..</div>
</script>
<span>Who cares, span is the man, the only visible one anyway!</span>
</body>
</html>
If you need to comment out script
tags, you could use a textarea
as wrapper instead, off course doing it this way, you can't comment out textarea
tags.
<html>
<head>
</head>
<body>
<!-- multiline "comment" below using textarea style="display:none;" -->
<textarea style="display:none;">
<script>
alert("which won't show up..");
</script>
Hello world!
<!-- Look at me, I'm a comment :) -->
<div>Yeah, whatever, I'm an element..</div>
</textarea>
<span>Who cares, span is the man, the only visible one anyway!</span>
</body>
</html>
Solution 4
No. The closing comment tag --> will always end the comment section so if your comment includes a comment the closing tag of your included comment will end the comment section.
You can do a replace of --> in the section you are about to comment out to something unique so you can later just do another replace back to --> if you choose to undo your commenting.
Solution 5
Nope, unfortunately HTML comments don't nest.
Tony R
Updated on July 09, 2022Comments
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Tony R almost 2 years
Is there a way to comment multiple lines... which already have some comments in them?
i.e.
<html> <!-- Multi-line comment begin <head> <!-- This script does abcxyz --> <script>...</script> </head> <body> Hello world! </body> Multi-line comment end --> </html>
It seems that even SO's syntax hilighting won't accept this...
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naught101 over 5 yearsIt's a little annoying, but you can leave the other comments in by just removing the
-->
part of each one.
-
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Tony R over 13 yearssheesh, really? Am I the only one aggravated by this? o.O Thanks for the php advice though...
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Andrew about 6 yearsLolz. I guess doing this works...:
<--blahblah<--moreblahblah--<blahbleebloblah-->
(then when you uncomment you get:blahblah<--moreblahblah--<blahbleebloblah
, which at least comments out a whole bunch so it's noticeable - then you just switch the < to >). -
BizzyBob over 2 yearsThis worked great for me. Thanks for sharing!