Re: Syntax highlighting servlet

Kenneth Patrick Turvey <kt-usenet@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Out of curiosity, in case I end up implementing this myself, do most syntax
> highlighting engines use regular expression substitutions, or do they actually
> parse the language being highlighted? Is the extra effort involved in parsing
> worth it?

The vast majority of syntax highlighter only do the lexical analysis
(which you can do with regular expressions). Parsing is definitely
harder and there's no core API to do it (Java 1.4 and later comes with a
regular expression matcher). Whether it's worth it is, of course, your
call... but for casual uses, I'd say no. Anyone doing serious work on
the code will copy it into a development tool anyway.

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