[TxMt] Syntax Highlight Question

[Allan Odgaard]

On Dec 6, 2004, at 19:22, Jeroen van der Ham wrote:

> [...] The thing I want to do is something like:
> - match commands (begin with '\' followed by a word
> - this can be followed by [\w+]
> - and this can be followed by {.*}
>
> And what I would like to do is apply the global patterns to the '.*' 
> mentioned above, and if nothing global matches, then apply a color.

Yes, that requires recursion in the rules which is not supported at 
present time (but will be a 1.1 thing). You can make the inner rule 
match nested braces though, something like:
    \{[^{}]*(?R)?[^{}]*\}

This will match a sequence of properly nested braces from the starting 
brace to the matching ending brace. E.g. for the string:
     \foo{\bar{\fud{...}}} \other

It will match this portion:
         {\bar{\fud{...}}}

But be careful with the (?R) construct, it currently doesn't check for 
infinite recursions (which include left-recursions).

> PS. I seem to remember something about using groups to define 
> different colors in a pattern, but I forgot how that works. Can anyone 
> tell me how that works and/or add that to the wiki ? :)

This is from Help -> Syntax Highlight:

    Additionally you can append [n] to any of the keys which
    set the color or font style, to only make the color/font
    style affect the nth regular expression capture. When
    you add this suffix, you must quote the key, if you use
    the ASCII property list format.

    For example, if we want to match @selector, but only
    want to underline the word part, we could make a rule
    like this:
    (
       match = "@(selector)"; "fontStyle[1]" = ( underline );
    )