Re: How to highlight a large number of keywords?

[Stefan Monnier]

> I'm trying to highlight a large number of keywords, 12000, with
> font-lock. I've made a regexp using regexp-opt. This doesnt work, I dont
> get any errors, but it seems the regexp is too large.

If you don't get an error, it should work (else, it's just a bug).
Most likely, it's a bug (12000 keywords is very likely to overflow the
maximum size of a compiled regexp).

> What would be the best way to highlight this large number of keywords
> in Emacs?

Use a regexp that matches a superset of all those keywords, and then
extract the matched string and compare it to your set of 12000 keywords
to see if it's indeed one of them.


        Stefan