Stripping whitespace and c-style comments from otherwise valid JSON data

gistfile1.js

function strip_comments(s) {
    return s.replace(/[ \t\r\n]+|\/\*(?:[^*]|[*][^\/])*\*\/|\/\/[^\n]*\n|"(?:[^\\"]|\\.)*"|[^ \t\r\n"\/]+/g,
                     function(s){ return (" \t\r\n\/".indexOf(s[0])==-1) ? s : ""; });
}

The idea of the regexp is processing the source in chunks where a chunk is either

• removable spacing (space, tab, newline and carriage return)
• a multi-line /* ... */ C comment (line continuation rules of C are not supported)
• a single-line // ... C comment
• a double-quoted string
• a sequence of non-dangerous characters (i.e. anything but spacing, double quotes or "/")

if the chunk starts with spacing or "/" is discarded, otherwise is copied