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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}[~].*
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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.

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10 Comments

What makes you think that comments don't contain ~?
@u_mulder I see it in official doc and didn't found that syntax.
In Geany when comment short-cut(Ctrl + E) is applied the comments applied contain //~
Comments should start with //. But after that I can write any symbols.
@u_mulder Right. But ~ is not mandatory, I've updated the answer. Also, previous regex ^\s*(\/\/|#).* will match that type of comments too since it starts with //.
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