simplest way to strip a comment from the end of a line?

[Joe Strout]

I have lines in a config file which can end with a comment (delimited  
by # as in Python), but which may also contain string literals  
(delimited by double quotes).  A comment delimiter within a string  
literal doesn't count.  Is there any easy way to strip off such a  
comment, or do I need to use a loop to find each # and then count the  
quotation marks to its left?

Thanks,
- Joe