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

[Bozhidar Batsov]

On Sunday, March 2, 2014 at 12:19 AM, Dmitry Gutov wrote:

Bozhidar Batsov <bozhidar@batsov.com> 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.