Subject: bug#41185: highlight-regexp not working properly for multiline-matching regexps

From: Michael Heerdegen <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 13 Jun 2021 18:37:02 +0200

Lars Ingebrigtsen <[email-masked]> writes:

> I can reproduce what the original bug report is seeing -- but that's
> because the regexp seems to be wrong?  There's nothing in the test file
> that matches "# endif".
>
> However the following call does properly match the region I think was
> intended, and works fine, as far as I can see (in Emacs 26.1 and 28):
>
> (highlight-regexp "def HALF_LJ[^^]+?# +endif")
>
> Or do I misunderstand what the original problem was?

I think you must read the original report further, where there is a text
example with "endif" for that highlighting fails.  AFAICT the complaint
is about multi-line matches not being highlighted.

I think `highlight-regexp' is not able to highlight multiline
stuff, but the docstring doesn't tell anything about this.

Michael.