nginx: redirect subfolder to subdomain

I'm trying to redirect a subfolder to a subdomain in nginx. I want http://example.com/~meow/ to be redirected to http://meow.example.com/. I tried the following:

location ~ ^/\~meow/(.*)$ {
    rewrite ^(.*)$ http://meow.example.com$1 permanent;

}

But it doesn't work. It gets caught by my location block for user directories:

location ~ ^/~([^/]+)/(.+\.php)$ {
    [...]
}

and


location ~ ^/\~([^/]+)/(.*)$ {
    [...]
}

So, how would I do this? Oh, and I only want /~meow/ to be redirected. All other user directories should not be changed.

Answer

You could try using nested location like this

location ~ ^/\~([^/]+)/(.*)$ {
  location ~ ^/\~meow/(.*)$ {
    rewrite ^(.*)$ http://meow.example.com$1 permanent;     
  }
  [...]
}