The SPAN rule, which must be placed inside a
RULES tag, highlights text between a start
and end string. The start and end strings are specified inside
child elements of the SPAN tag.
The following attributes are supported:
TYPE - The token type to highlight the
span with. See the section called “Token Types” for a list of token
types.
AT_LINE_START - If set to
TRUE, the span will only be highlighted if the start
sequence occurs at the beginning of a line.
AT_WHITESPACE_END - If set to
TRUE, the span will only be highlighted if the
start sequence is the first non-whitespace text in the line.
AT_WORD_START - If set to
TRUE, the span will only be highlighted if the start
sequence occurs at the beginning of a word.
DELEGATE - text inside the span will be
highlighted with the specified ruleset. To delegate to a ruleset defined
in the current mode, just specify its name. To delegate to a ruleset
defined in another mode, specify a name of the form
mode::ruleset
EXCLUDE_MATCH - If set to
TRUE, the start and end sequences will not be highlighted,
only the text between them will.
NO_ESCAPE - If set to
TRUE, the ruleset's escape character will have no
effect before the span's end string. Otherwise, the presence of the escape
character will cause that occurrence of the end string to be ignored.
NO_LINE_BREAK - If set to
TRUE, the span will not cross line breaks.
NO_WORD_BREAK - If set to
TRUE, the span will not cross word breaks.
Note that the AT_LINE_START,
AT_WHITESPACE_END and
AT_WORD_START attributes can also be used on the
BEGIN and END elements. Setting these
attributes to the same value on both elements has the same effect as
setting them on the SPAN element.
Here is a SPAN that highlights Java string literals,
which cannot include line breaks:
<SPAN TYPE="LITERAL1" NO_LINE_BREAK="TRUE"> <BEGIN>"</BEGIN> <END>"</END> </SPAN>
Here is a SPAN that highlights Java documentation
comments by delegating to the “JAVADOC” ruleset defined
elsewhere in the current mode:
<SPAN TYPE="COMMENT2" DELEGATE="JAVADOC"> <BEGIN>/**</BEGIN> <END>*/</END> </SPAN>
Here is a SPAN that highlights HTML cascading stylesheets
inside <STYLE> tags by delegating to the main
ruleset in the CSS edit mode:
<SPAN TYPE="MARKUP" DELEGATE="css::MAIN"> <BEGIN><style></BEGIN> <END></style></END> </SPAN>