Re: define multi-line comments

[David Hansen]

On Sat, 21 Jun 2008 10:32:39 +0200 henry atting wrote:

> David Hansen wrote:
>
>> On Fri, 20 Jun 2008 16:46:37 +0200 henry atting wrote:
>>
>>> I have my own text mode (derived from text-mode), which defines some
>>> syntax highlighting. Defining keywords is no problem but as far as I see
>>> keywords don't work on serveral lines, e.g. this
>>>
>>>          (list "\".*\"" 0 'font-lock-variable-name-face t) 
>>>
>>> only highlights words or phrases till the line break.
>>> Can anyone give me a hint how to get it work multi-line.
>>
>> There are some words about this in the Elisp manual, lookup
>> `font-lock-multiline'.  But this is incredible complicated.
>
> Oh yes, you really might say this ;)
>
> In the meantime I found a way to do it. I looked into lua-mode.el where
> mulit-line comments work and changed it according to my needs:
>
>         (list
>        "\\(?:^\\|[^-]\\)\\(\"\\(=*\\)\\(?:.\\|\n\\)*?\"\\)"
>        '(1 'font-lock-string-face t))

Setting `font-lock-multiline' to `t' and using regexps that spawn more
than one line works "a bit".  If it's not to important to highlight
always correctly and if the regexp "usually" matches only one line this
is an option as well.

>
>> But in many circumstances you can use `font-lock-syntactic-keywords' to
>> make some region a "string" or "comment" and then use
>> `font-lock-syntactic-face-function' to give it another face.
>
> Now I will take a look at this. Thanks :)

Someone should tell the lua-mode developers about it...  This works
perfectly well if you have one region and one face for the whole region.
But it's not an option for regions with multiple faces (like e.g. long
function declarations in C).

David