Re: auto-mode-alist - recognize prefix instead of sufix?

[Kevin Rodgers <kevin.d.rodgers@gmail.com>]

Lennart Borgman (gmail) wrote:
> Christian Herenz wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> is it possible to use a major-mode on files with a certain prefix?
>> I know that I can do something like this:
>>
>> (setq auto-mode-alist (cons '("\\.html$" . 
>> html-helper-mode)auto-mode-alist))
>>
>> But what about opening files like foo.comments, foo.examples and so on 
>> in a special mode?
> 
> 
> I never tried, but from the documentation it looks perfectly possible. 
> Have you tried to use a regexp like "^foo\." ?

It is definitely possible, but the auto-mode-alist regexp is matched
against the whole file name sans backup suffix i.e.
(file-name-sans-version buffer-file-name).

So the regexp should be something like "\\(\\`\\|/\\)foo\.[^/]*\\'"

-- 
Kevin Rodgers
Denver, Colorado, USA