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phpregexreplacecommentsgeany

How to delete all single-line PHP comment lines through Regex in any editor

I have a PHP file open in editor like Geany/Notepad++ which has both type of comments single-line and block-comments.

Now as block-comments are useful for documentation, I only want to remove single-line comments starting with //~ or #. Other comments starting with // should remain if they are not starting line from //.

How can I do that with a regular expression? I tried this one below, but I get stuck up in escaping slash and also including #.

^[#][\/]{2}[~].*
Solution

  • The problem with the regex ^[#][\/]{2}[~].* is that it matches a line starting with #//~.

    The regex is the same as

    ^#\/\/~.*

    Use the regex

    ^\s*(\/\/|#).*

    Demo

    Description:

    The single-line comments can start at the beginning of the line or after a few spaces (indentation).

    1. ^: Start of the line
    2. \s*: Any number of spaces
    3. (\/\/|#): Match // or # characters. | is OR in regex.
    4. .*: Match any characters(except newline) any number of times

    Note that PHP comments does not contain tilde ~ after //. Even if ~ is present after //, as the above regex checks for // and doesn't care for the characters after it, the comment with //~ will also be matched.