Is this syntax parse possible with Emacs' regex expressions?

Question

I'm trying to write a small new mode for some input files to a specific computational physics program. I'm doing it the define-derived-mode way, and was specifying the syntax highlighting by setting the font-lock-defaults variable, when I realized I needed a regex that does "match any lone words between a line start and an equals sign, not including the equals sign."

This is relatively straightforward with extended regex; I found a quite popular SO answer that gave a short solution in terms of a zero-width assertion. However, I don't see any extended regex support in the manual.

Is there a way to do this with Emacs' regex? If not, is there a way to do it with rx (with which I'm an absolue novice)? Failing that, how do packages like cc-mode which need to do something similar to identify different parts of e.g. a variable declaration in their syntax highlighting do this?

Answer 1

If a regexp doesn't work, you can use function that does the matching for you. If it behave as a match function, i.e. set match-data and return non-nil when it match something, you can continue to use the font-lock keyword to specify which face to apply to which part of the match.

See the documentation for font-lock-keywords for more details.

One such package that use this technique is https://github.com/Lindydancer/cmake-font-lock -- for example cmake-font-lock-match-dollar-braces is used to match the ${xxx} construct.

Answer 2

If you want to match foo= and then highlight the foo part, font-lock allows you to do that by grouping sub-expressions in the regexp and then highlighting only a specified sub-expression. Look for SUBEXP in C-h v font-lock-keywords.

C-hig (elisp)Search-based Fontification says:

‘(MATCHER . SUBEXP)’
     In this kind of element, MATCHER is either a regular expression or
     a function, as described above.  The CDR, SUBEXP, specifies which
     subexpression of MATCHER should be highlighted (instead of the
     entire text that MATCHER matched).

          ;; Highlight the ‘bar’ in each occurrence of ‘fubar’,
          ;; using ‘font-lock-keyword-face’.
          ("fu\\(bar\\)" . 1)

     If you use ‘regexp-opt’ to produce the regular expression MATCHER,
     you can use ‘regexp-opt-depth’ (*note Regexp Functions::) to
     calculate the value for SUBEXP.