/**
 * Blank comment bodies while preserving every byte offset.
 *
 * An extractor that wants to ignore comments but still report true line numbers needs
 * BLANKING (replace with spaces) rather than stripping, so an index into the result is
 * an index into the original. It also needs to be STRING-AWARE, which is the part a
 * regex cannot do: `app.use('/static/*', …)` is a glob route, not the start of a block
 * comment, and treating it as one silently erases everything up to the next block-comment terminator —
 * typically the file's next JSDoc, and with it the file's entire middleware inventory.
 *
 * So this is a single-pass character scanner, modeled on `stripComments` in
 * duplicate-detector.ts (same string/escape handling, same "unterminated runs to
 * end-of-input" degradation) but writing spaces instead of dropping characters. Being a
 * scanner rather than a regex also makes it linear by construction — no backtracking,
 * no quantifier to bound — where the regex form was quadratic until its own bound.
 *
 * KNOWN LIMIT, shared with the scanner it is modeled on: a regex literal containing
 * `/*` or `//` (e.g. `/ab\/*cd/`) is read as a comment opener. Distinguishing a regex
 * literal from division needs real parser context; the failure mode is over-blanking a
 * rare line, never mis-positioning one.
 */
/**
 * Return `text` with the contents of `//` and block comments replaced by spaces.
 * Newlines are preserved exactly, so `text.length`, every `\n` index, and therefore
 * every derived line number are identical to the input's.
 */
export declare function blankCommentsPreservingLayout(text: string): string;
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