Regular expression finding empty comments in code

Question

i am looking for a regular expression which only finds empty java comments like the following one:

/**
 * 
 */

Eclipse creates those when e.g. generating a serial version id... There is another thread about finding all comments however i didn't manage to adapt the regex to only "filter" out the empty ones.

//.*|("(?:\\[^"]|\\"|.)*?")|(?s)/\*.*?\*/

Any ideas? Thanks!

Answer 1

Try this:

\/\*\*[\s\t\r\n]*[ \*]*[\s\t\r\n]*\*/

Should match any string which starts with /**, ends with */ and contains only line breaks, spaces or asterisks in between.

Answer 2

Wouldn't

"\\s*/[*]{2}[*\\s]*[*]/\\s*"

together with the Pattern.MULTILINE flag suffice?

It starts with whitespace (optional), then comes /** then there is only whitespace and * followed by */ optionally followed by more whitespace.

This is how it looks:

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