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

["Robert D. Crawford" <rdc1x@comcast.net>]

"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'.


-- 
Robert D. Crawford                                      rdc1x@comcast.net

This fortune was brought to you by the people at Hewlett-Packard.