langs.xml: Distinguish between range and 'range (apostrophe!)

[el-coder-sb]

This questions refers to #8511.

Is there a way to make a different coloring for

range

and

'range

or any other keyword once with and the other time without apostrophe <'> .

When I enter the two versions to different keyword types in langs.xml both are colored the same way.

Any idea how to do to get different coloring?

[PeterJones]

@el-coder-sb ,

In my experience, the keywords (whether default or user-defined) for a given language’s styler (lexer) all must be composed of ASCII “word” characters (A-Z, a-z, 0-9, and _ underscore). Some of the lexer’s might manually override that, but I don’t know of any off the top of my head.

In case that’s not clear: as far as I know, what you want cannot be done natively in Notepad++ without a source-code change.

However, you can add extra highlighting to a builtin lexer (like the VHDL lexer) using regexes via the script EnhanceAnyLexer.py that @Ekopalypse shares in his github repo – since it’s regex based, it should be fairly easy to set up a regex like '(range|length) which would recognize 'range or 'length, and color those separately from the builtin non-apostrophe versions

(Interesting: in the VHDL definition, the range keyword is in both the INSTRUCTION (name="instre1") and in the ATTRIBUTE (name="type1") lists. The INSTRUCTION formatting takes precedence.)

[el-coder-sb]

@PeterJones Thanks a lot for that very good information!
I´ll see how to deal with this.