Re: What is this syntax for in php-mode.el

["Lennart Borgman (gmail)" <lennart.borgman@gmail.com>]

Robert D. Crawford wrote:
> "Lennart Borgman (gmail)" <lennart.borgman@gmail.com> writes:
> 
>> Thanks Ted. Now I only wonder about that strange
>> font-lock-syntactic-keywords spec that I can not find in the Emacs
>> lisp manual.
> 
> This might help, fetched with apropos:
> 
> font-lock-syntactic-keywords is a variable defined in `font-lock.el'.
> Its value is nil
> 
> 
> Documentation:
> A list of the syntactic keywords to put syntax properties on.
> The value can be the list itself, or the name of a function or variable
> whose value is the list.
> 
> See `font-lock-keywords' for a description of the form of this list;
> only the differences are stated here.  MATCH-HIGHLIGHT should be of the form:
> 
>  (SUBEXP SYNTAX OVERRIDE LAXMATCH)
> 
> where SYNTAX can be a string (as taken by `modify-syntax-entry'), a syntax
> table, a cons cell (as returned by `string-to-syntax') or an expression whose
> value is such a form.  OVERRIDE cannot be `prepend' or `append'.
> 
> Here are two examples of elements of `font-lock-syntactic-keywords'
> and what they do:
> 
>  ("\\$\\(#\\)" 1 ".")
> 
>  gives a hash character punctuation syntax (".") when following a
>  dollar-sign character.  Hash characters in other contexts will still
>  follow whatever the syntax table says about the hash character.
> 
>  ("\\('\\).\\('\\)"
>   (1 "\"")
>   (2 "\""))
> 
>  gives a pair single-quotes, which surround a single character, a SYNTAX of
>  "\"" (meaning string quote syntax).  Single-quote characters in other
>  contexts will not be affected.
> 
> This is normally set via `font-lock-defaults'.


Maybe. My trouble is that I can not fit something like the below into 
this format:

     (list
      ;; Mark _all_ # chars as being comment-start.  That will be
      ;; ignored when inside a quoted string.
      '("\\(\#\\)"
        (1 (11 . nil)))
      ;; Mark all newlines ending a line with # as being comment-end.
      ;; This causes a problem, premature end-of-comment, when '#'
      ;; appears inside a multiline C-style comment.  Oh well.
      '("#.*?\\([\n]\\)"
        (1 (12 . nil)))

This code works except for trouble of the kind noted in the comment. I 
am trying to understand if there is any way around this problem.