How to prevent from translating comments with gettext()

[toonzi]

I am using gettext() to process internationalization of my website. The fact is that I use Smarty as template engine and I had to comment part of my html code by smarty's tag : {* *}. The problem is that these comments are ful l of code that I developed once but that I don't want to get rid of. So gettext() reads the inside (inbetween curly braces) code, and generates a .po file with lot of non necessary translation items. How can I prevent myself to have a clean po file with no extra translation items. A regexp on my code or a parameter to set with gettext() ?