Re: etags - Word separators with xref-find-definitions

[Leo Butler]

Christian Barthel <bch@online.de> writes:

> On Sun, Jul 25 2021, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
>
>>> Is it possible to customize the xref function such that it
>>> recognize ‘schema.objectname’?  Are there any variables to
>>> control the behavior of M-. ?
>>
>> You need to customize the etags.el function that is used to guess the
>> symbol at point.  The function is this:
>>
>>   (defun find-tag--default ()
>>     (funcall (or find-tag-default-function
>>               (get major-mode 'find-tag-default-function)
>>               #'find-tag-default)))
>>
>> So either customizing find-tag-default-function to point to a function
>> of your choice, or making such a function local to the SQL major mode
>> by putting the property on the major-mode's symbol, should do the
>> job.  You will probably need to write the function itself, though.
>
> OK, thanks so far.  My first draft for this looks something like
> this:
>
> (defun find-sql-identifier ()
>   (when (thing-at-point-looking-at
>          "\\([.a-zA-Z0-9]*\\)" 50)
>     (if (match-beginning 1)
>       (buffer-substring (match-beginning 1) (match-end 1))
>       "")))
> (put major-mode 'find-tag-default-function 'find-sql-identifier)

Thanks for these pointers, Eli and Christian. I was able to fix a
similar problem I had with `xref-find-definitions' when trying to use it
with latex-mode to look up bibtex citations.

Leo