Re: identifiing strings and comments in program source files (to skip them over)

[Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca>]

> I have a mode what uses font-lock-mode and highlights everything nicely. I
> think I could use this (= the face set by font-lock-mode) for identifiing
> if e.g. a search stopped in a string or comment. (I know font-lock-mode
> must be enabled for this.) This way I could omit reparsing the buffer (with
> parse-partial-sexp) e.g. in a function what searches something "real" (=
> strings and comments should be skipped).

You can use this (I've used it in several occasions).
In Emacs-CVS you can also use syntax-ppss which is like parse-partial-sexp
except it does caching (and it's used by font-lock so the cache is already
filled by the font-lock activity).


        Stefan