Subject: bug#16915: 24.3.50; [ruby-mode] Comments in regexps using the extended syntax are not font-locked properly

From: Bozhidar Batsov <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 2 Mar 2014 13:03:14 +0200

On Sunday, March 2, 2014 at 12:19 AM, Dmitry Gutov wrote:
> Bozhidar Batsov <[email-masked] (mailto:[email-masked])> writes:
>  
> > In most editors/IDEs code like this
> >  
> > regexp = /
> > start # some text
> > \s # white space char
> > (group) # first group
> > (?:alt1|alt2) # some alternation
> > end
> > /x
> >  
> > will have the comments font-locked as comments, because comments are
> > allowed in the extended regexp literal syntax (/x). It would be nice
> > if this was taken into account in ruby-mode as well.
> >  
>  
>  
> Not sure how to implement it best.
>  
> Ideally, we'd have a new kind of syntax instead of strings (native
> regexp support?), which would make font-lock fontify comments inside.
>  
> Or maybe a modifier on the string syntax?
Native regexp support is preferable IMO. After all - regexps are not strings. If they were treated differently we’d also be able to have extra highlighting for things like named groups, quantifiers, regexp classes, etc. I guess, however, that this would require a lot of work.
>  
> Of course, we could just scan the contents of every regexp, look for any
> hash character that doesn't look like it starts interpolation, and
> forcibly fontify the text from it till the end of line.
>  
>