commenting out multiple lines of code with regular expressions

Question

I want to find every instance of a background image in a CSS document and comment it out:

background: url('images/test.jpg') no-repeat top left;

becomes

background: /*url('images/test.jpg')*/ no-repeat top left;

I'm having trouble escaping the * and / (don't want to comment out the entire background selector).

Answer 1

couldn't you just put in the search box url('images/test.jpg') and in the replace box: /*url('images/test.jpg')*/ (thus avoiding regular expressions at all)?
Setting the options 'search in:' to 'current document' and 'search for:' to 'source code', then hitting 'replace all'..

Answer 2

Something like this should work:

search for

background:(\s*url\s*\([^)]+\))

replace with

background:/*$1*/

You shouldn't have to escape the * and / in the replacement text

Answer 3

Search for :

(background)(.*)(url\('.*[^']'\))(.*)

Replace with :

$1$2/*$3*/$4