Simultaneously HighLighting and Outlining

You have to add your patterns in the order where the most specific, longer patterns occur first in the language definition and the more generic shorter ones come last.

I added your suggestion about the outlining indicators to our TODO list.

I thought I was doing that. Here is my langauge definition - hopefully you can point out where I'm going wrong:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<SyntaxLanguage Key="TestLang" LanguageDefinitionVersion="2.0" Secure="True">

<Styles>
<Style Key="CommandKeyWord" ForeColor="Blue" BackColor="White" Bold="False" Italic="False" Underline="False" />
</Styles>

<States>
<State Key="DefaultState">
<PatternGroups>
<!--Outlining-->
<RegexPatternGroup Token="WhileLoopToken" PatternValue="While\s*\(([^\)]*)\)\s*;" />
<RegexPatternGroup Token="EndToken" PatternValue="End\s*;"/>

<!-- Whitespace -->
<RegexPatternGroup Token="WhitespaceToken" PatternValue="{WhitespaceMacro}+" IsWhitespace="True" />

<!-- Line Terminators -->
<RegexPatternGroup Token="LineTerminatorToken" PatternValue="{LineTerminatorMacro}" IsWhitespace="True" />

<!-- Syntax Coloring -->
<ExplicitPatternGroup Token="CommandWordToken" Style="CommandKeyWord" LookAhead="{NonWordMacro}" CaseSensitivity="Sensitive">
<ExplicitPatterns>
While End
</ExplicitPatterns>
</ExplicitPatternGroup>

<RegexPatternGroup Token="IdentifierToken" PatternValue="(_ | {AlphaMacro})({WordMacro})*" />

</PatternGroups>

</State><!-- End Default State -->
</States>
</SyntaxLanguage>

[ 10-08-2004: Message edited by: rconde01 ]

I loaded your language def and added the following text and it lexically parsed it correctly:

While();
While
End;
End

It parses...but try this:

Type "While"...it will be blue.

Now finish it off to "While();"...now no longer blue. Thats the problem.

Rob

You just forgot to set the style for your special versions of the keyword, that's all. Add Style="CommandKeyWord" to your two special patterns. If you load the language def in our sample application you can see that the tokens are parsing fine (look in the statusbar), even though they appear black since they are currently using DefaultStyle.

I didn't forget...if I do that then the entire phrase "While();" will be blue - only "While" should be blue.

Ok then you should place the part that shouldn't be colored blue in a look-ahead pattern. There's a LookAhead attribute that you can use.

thats it!!! thx