Re: Conditionalized font-locking?

[Davis Herring <herring@lanl.gov>]

> (defun srb-date-time-matcher (lim)
>   "Search for date-time strings within LIM for font-locking."
>   (when (re-search-forward (concat "^\\(?1:[0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9]-"
>   				   "[0-9][0-9]-[0-9][0-9]\\)"
>   				   " \\(?2:[0-9]?[0-9]:[0-9][0-9]\\)?")
>                            lim t)
>     (let* ((date (match-string-no-properties 1))
>     	   (time (match-string-no-properties 2))
> 	   ;; days-between needs a non-empty time string.
>     	   (date-time (concat date " " (or time "00:00"))))
>       (when (< (days-between date-time (current-time-string)) 0)
> 	(concat date " " time)))))
> [...]
>      Fontification will call FUNCTION repeatedly with the same limit,
>      and with point where the previous invocation left it, until
>      FUNCTION fails.  On failure, FUNCTION need not reset point in any
>      particular way.

If any of your searches turns up a date you don't like, your function
fails (returns nil), so font-lock gives up.  You need to (unfortunately)
write much the same loop that font-lock is wrapping around your function
so that it finds the first date that it cares about rather than
returning nil.

The easy way to do this if you don't have too many dates being fontified
at one go is just to recursively call yourself when you don't like your
current match:

  (or (< ...) (srb-date-time-matcher lim))

Note that you needn't return any particular non-nil value on success;
it's the match-data that font-lock uses.

Davis

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