[Nano-devel] Color Syntax Highlighting for PHP

[Ryan Rubley]

Am I right to say its probably impossible to do this with the current 
regex implementation?
Somehow the regex's need to hold a state such that different color 
syntax can apply to the html vs the code inside <? ?> blocks.
I can't even figure out if its possible to highlight basic html in a 
manner similar to Mozilla's view source where <tag attr=value> has the 
"attr" one color and the "value" a different color. Even if it only 
highlighted "value" where "value" was inside quotes, you can't seem to 
disable the highlighting of quoted strings that are not part of html tag 
attributes.
If you could nest regex's maybe it would be easier.. I would love to see 
the ability to define blocks such as:
syntax "PHP" "\.php$"
block "HTMLTAG" start="<[^?]" end=">"
block "PHPCODE" start="<\?" end="\?>"

blocksyntax "HTMLTAG"
color brightblack start="<" end=">"
color brightmagenta "</?[a-zA-Z_][a-zA-Z0-9_]*"
color brightwhite "[<>]"

blocksyntax "PHPCODE"
color brightyellow "\$[a-zA-Z_][a-zA-Z0-9_]*"

but that probably requires a major overhaul in the color code I would bet.