How do you color certain text after a keyword in notepad++?

Ekopalypse

Yes, this is a hexadecimal value that specifies the color used to highlight the matches.
To quote the documentation from the configuration file:

; Each configured lexer must have a section with its name,
; (NOTE: use the menu function "Enhance current language" as it takes care of the correct naming)
; followed by one or more lines with the syntax
; color = regular expression.
; A color is a number in the range 0 - 16777215.
; The notation is either pure digits or a hex notation starting with 0x or #, 
; such as 0xff00ff or #ff00ff.
; Please note: 
; * red goes in the lowest byte (0x0000FF)
; * green goes in the center byte (0x00FF00)
; * blue goes in the biggest byte (0xFF0000) 
; * this BGR order might conflict with your expectation of RGB order.
; * see Microsoft COLORREF documentation https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/gdi/colorref

Leahnn Rey

@Ekopalypse Works like a charm, now, how do i make it so that for example, i want my text to be colored blue after the keyword ‘function’. I have absolutely no idea what an .ini file is.

PeterJones

@Leahnn-Rey ,

I have absolutely no idea what an .ini file is.

The .ini file is the configuration file that you opened when you clicked Plugins > Enhance Any Lexer > Enhance current language – ie, the file that has the color codes in it.

i want my text to be colored blue after the keyword ‘function’.

Then you need to come up with a regular expression (regex) that matches the word after the keyword function. In the .ini file, the color goes on the left of the equal sign, and the regex goes on the right. So in the original example that Enhance current language created for you, 0x66ad1 = \w+:

the color is 0x66ad1, which means 6 units of blue, 6a=106 units of green, and d1=209 units of red;
the regex is \w+ which means “one or more word characters” (where a word character is defined as letters, numbers, and underscore).

So you would need to create a regex that does what you want. Those regex follow the same rules for Notepad++'s regular-expression search, as defined here in the user manual.

To give you a freebie, you want it to require the prefix function , then match one or more word characters: that would look like function \w+ . But that changes the color of the function keyword as well as the function’s name, which is probably not what you want.

Instead, you will want to either “reset” the regex between with a \K (everything before the \K is “thrown out” after it matches, so using function \K\w+ will match function-space, throw it out, and then match-and-color one or more word charaters) or use a positive lookbehind with (?<=...) (so in your case, lookbehind for function-space, then normal match on one or more words would be (?<=function )\w+ ).

Hope this helps.

Leahnn Rey

@PeterJones Thank you so much Peter. You have no idea how much this is gonna help me.

Leahnn Rey

@PeterJones If i wanted to, can i add multiple ones? such as void or function?

Alan Kilborn

You have no idea how much this is gonna help me.

I think the discussion in this thread has also helped others understand the EnhanceAnyLexer plugin a little better, too. I know it has helped me.

PeterJones

@Leahnn-Rey said in How do you color certain text after a keyword in notepad++?:

If i wanted to, can i add multiple ones? such as void or function?

Yes.

There are two ways: you could either do a separate color = regex pair, if you want them each different colors (or even the same color but simple maintenance), or you could build a more complicated regex

0x66ad1 = function \K\w+
0x22CD7 = void \K\w+

vs

0x66ad1 = (?<=function |void )\w+

Leahnn Rey

@PeterJones If i do that, it just says “Invalid lookbehind assertion encountered in the regular expression.”

PeterJones

@Leahnn-Rey ,

0x66ad1 = (function|void) \K\w+

Sorry, I had forgotten that alternation is not a “fixed length lookbehind”: I remembered you couldn’t have + or * or ? modifiers in a lookbehind, but you also cannot have the alternation if the lengths of the alternates are different. Switch to alternation with the \K, as I show in this reply, gets rid of that problem (because \K doesn’t have the fixed-width requirement)

Leahnn Rey

@PeterJones Didn’t work. It works when i do:

0xb0c94e = void \K\w+
0xb0c94e = function \K\w+

So i will keep it that way. I’m having an issue with the positive lookahead. Since i like monokai (Which is the theme i’m using) i want my text to be colore green when there is a () at the end. But, when i do:

0x600e6a3 = (?=\(\))\w+

It doesn’t color the text before the parenthesis. Am i doing something wrong here?
NOTE: i read the documentation

Neil Schipper

@Leahnn-Rey

This should work: \w+(?=\(\))

Think of the look-ahead as a kind of modifier of the active (ie, already specified, and so, to the left of the look-ahead) match specification.

Ekopalypse

@Alan-Kilborn said in How do you color certain text after a keyword in notepad++?:

You have no idea how much this is gonna help me.

I think the discussion in this thread has also helped others understand the EnhanceAnyLexer plugin a little better, too. I know it has helped me.

Then I thoroughly missed my target with the in-place documentation within the confuiguration file, because I had hoped that it would be as easy to understand as it could be.
:-(

Alan Kilborn

@Ekopalypse said in How do you color certain text after a keyword in notepad++?:

Then I thoroughly missed my target with the in-place documentation within the confuiguration file, because I had hoped that it would be as easy to understand as it could be.

Well, I don’t know about that.
Maybe I meant it more like: “Some real world examples (e.g. from this thread) have encouraged me to get more into the EnhanceAnyLexer plugin”.

Leahnn Rey

@Neil-Schipper said in How do you color certain text after a keyword in notepad++?:

\w+(?=\(\))

Works like a charm. Thanks!

Leahnn Rey

@Neil-Schipper The thing is, when i enter in function parameters, the coloring disappears.

PeterJones

@Ekopalypse said in How do you color certain text after a keyword in notepad++?:

I had hoped that it would be as easy to understand as it could be.

Trust me: getting documentation so that everyone can understand is hard. ;-)

And, as Alan said, sometimes it just takes seeing a few examples of people doing interesting-to-me things with a specific plugin before I see the usefulness of a given plugin.

Alan Kilborn

@Leahnn-Rey said in How do you color certain text after a keyword in notepad++?:

The thing is, when i enter in function parameters, the coloring disappears.

That’s because with the expression you’ve used you’ve told it to color only things like: func1() or my_func(), not func2(3,5) or func3("test").

Time to learn about regular expressions!

Leahnn Rey

@Alan-Kilborn I do know about that. What i’m asking here is how i can color it even if it has parameters. I do know regex, but i’m just a beginner yet. So i don’t know advanced stuff.

Alan Kilborn

@Leahnn-Rey

It may take some tweaking to get it exactly right in all cases, but maybe this regular expression moves you closer?:

\w+(?=\(.*?\))

I’m not sure where the limit of us writing regular expressions for you stops and you roll up your sleeves and craft your own is…

I think the original question of “How do you color certain text after a keyword in notepad++?” has been answered, as far as the tools having been provided.

PeterJones

@Leahnn-Rey said in How do you color certain text after a keyword in notepad++?:

I do know regex, but i’m just a beginner yet.

Which is why we’ve given you a few examples, and linked you to the regex documentation. I know you’ve said you’ve read it… but reading the documentation for regex once is never enough to understand the practicalities of it; I’ve been using regex for years (decades?) and still have to look up things on that page all the time.

What you really need to do is start with easy expressions, give yourself a goal, and try to find the answer yourself to that goal in the documentation:

For example, the “easy” part of your original goal was “how do I match a word”; you would have then dug into the documents, and found that \w is a “word character” and + means “make the quantity of the previous thing ‘one or more’”, and put those two together to find that “find one or more word characters in a row” is written as \w+ . Or, since we gave you that one as part of the freebie, you could have just looked up the meanings, and found other things nearby, like the concept of * meaning “0 or more of the previous thing” compared to + as 1-or-more, or that . means “any character” similar to \w meaning “only word characters”. (And yes, .* to match “0 or more of anything” is a pretty common idiom that you need to learn right away, if you’re going to call yourself even a beginner with regular expressions.)

Your next goal might have been “after a prefix like function or void” … but that was a complicated one, and one I wouldn’t expect a newbie to get on their own right away. Which is why I just gave it to you as part of the freebie. So this goal was bypassed for now (though at some point, you’ll want to understand the \K and lookaheads and lookbehinds more thoroughly).

You got the literal parentheses yourself, which is great! And Neil helped you put the lookahead in the right place (once again, getting lookaheads right is not an easy task, and one we’re more willing to do freebies on).

Moving on to your added requirement of “optional parameters between the parentheses”, your first thought for doing yourself could have been “how do I translate that into computerese? hmm, maybe ‘optional means “zero or more”; so zero or more of any character between literal parentheses’ …” With that mental translation, it would have rung some bells: you already knew the parentheses; “any character” was the . that you should have found earlier, and “zero or more” was the * that was a line away from the +'s documentation, which you had already learned. Putting that together, you get "parameters between the parentheses as \(.*\) . You might have seen that it matched too far, and if you didn’t find the ? on your own (right next to + and *), you could have asked a directed question “I got \(.*\) to match the parentheses with optional parameters, but how do I make it stop at the first close-parenthesis?”, which is more likely to get answered.

Please note: I went into this detailed explanation of the thought processes involved, not because I am mad or think you are foolish or any such nonsense, but because I want to help you learn… these are thought processes you need to learn, if you ever want to get good with even simple regex. Since you hadn’t learned those processes yet, I thought I would share them.

But also understand that this forum is not a write-my-regex-for-me free-for-all, and regular contributors here quickly tire of answering a long series of “my requirements have changed, please add this feature to the regex you already gave me” from a user. The more effort you show, the more and better replies you will receive.

Good luck.