Re: How to highlight-regexp across multiple lines

[Nicolas Richard]

Angus Comber <anguscomber@gmail.com> writes:

> I was looking at this question on stackoverflow and it seems regex can
> select across multiple lines generally but how would I do so for
> highlight-regexp in emacs?
>
> http://stackoverflow.com/questions/159118/how-do-i-match-any-character-across-multiple-lines-in-a-regular-expression
>
>
> Eg I want to highlight ALL text from aPDU... to the final closing brace:

interactively, you enter the string it as follows:
a P D U [ ^ C-q 0 RET ] + C-q C-j } RET

in elisp it gives:
(highlight-regexp "aPDU[^\000]+?\n}" (quote hi-yellow))

C-q 0 RET inserts a character which has '0' as octal (or whatevervalue
read-quoted-char-radix is) representation, that's the NUL character that
Thorsten mentionned. This is equivalent to "\000" in elisp.

C-q C-j inserts a new line character (simply hitting RET would terminate
the prompt, so that's not an option). This is equivalent to "\n" in elisp.

The idea is : highlight *everything* lazily from the string "aPDU" up to
the first sequence "newline-closing brace".

HTH,

-- 
Nico.