Syntax Highlighting routine help needed

Garrett · Post by **Garrett** » Fri Jan 30, 2009 11:40 am

I've been working on this off and on for about a year or so now, and I'm just not getting what I want from it. It does work, it highlights html tags, but it's slow. I've totally hit brain blockage on this and can't think of any new way to do this or speed it up.

Can someone please take a look at what I've got so far and maybe give me some ideas or help on making my code work faster or better...

Currently, it highlights the entire html page when you select and load one, but! It can lock up Rev on some bigger files... Still not sure what's happening there yet. It also can take a very long time loading the file since I'm formatting it at load up also.

I'd thought about trying to only highlight what's in view in the editor window, but my attempt at that before lead to a slow scrolling issue.

Highlighting as you type seems to work fine though, if anything, I believe I did something right with that!

If anyone has the time and maybe some ideas/suggestions/help, feel free to download what I have and check it over.

http://www.paraboliclogic.com/syntaxhighlight.rev

One of these days, I'd really like to finish this... But between A.D.D. and brain farts, I tell ya!

Thanks in advance,
~Garrett

Mark · Post by **Mark** » Fri Jan 30, 2009 11:47 am

Hi Garrett,

Can you post a link to a file that makes Rev lock up? I tried it with my own homepage and that seems to work fine --quite fast actually, on my 2.16Ghz MacBook.

Best,

Mark

Garrett · Post by **Garrett** » Fri Jan 30, 2009 8:59 pm

Sure, I'll upload like a bookmarks file from firefox which did it.

http://www.paraboliclogic.com/bookmarks.html

as well, my index page on my site did it too

http://www.paraboliclogic.com/index.html

Thanks,
~Garrett

Mark · Post by **Mark** » Sat Jan 31, 2009 9:37 pm

Hi Garrett,

You loop at least 2 times through the entire file, character by character. You can make your code much faster by using offset instead of a repeat loop that checks each and every single character.

Best,

Mark

Garrett · Post by **Garrett** » Sun Feb 01, 2009 11:54 am

Offset eh... Ok, I'll hit the docs and check that out. Thanks a bunch.

Garrett · Post by **Garrett** » Thu Feb 05, 2009 9:31 pm

Well that sure cut a lot of code out that I had, but now I'm having another problem

Code: Select all

  put 0 into varCharIndex
  put 0 into varTempTimer
  repeat until offset("<",field "fHtmlEditor",varCharIndex) is 0 or varTempTimer > 100
put varTempTimer + 1 into varTempTimer
    put offset("<",field "fHtmlEditor",varCharIndex) into varStart
    put offset(">",field "fHtmlEditor",varCharIndex) into varEnd
    put char varStart to varEnd of field "fHtmlEditor" into varTemp

put varCharIndex into field "temptestfield"

    put empty into varTagType
    put varStart + 3 into varTemp
    put char varStart to varTemp of field "fHtmlEditor" into varTemp

    if varTemp is "<!--" then
      put "comment" into varTagType
    end if
    put varStart + 6 into varTemp
    put char varStart to varTemp of field "fHtmlEditor" into varTemp
    if varTemp is "<script" then
      put "script" into varTagType
    end if
    put varStart + 7 into varTemp
    put char varStart to varTemp of field "fHtmlEditor" into varTemp
    if varTemp is "</script" then
      put "script" into varTagType
    end if

    set the textstyle of char varStart to varEnd of field "fHtmlEditor" to plain
    if varTagType is "comment" then
      set the textstyle of char varStart to varEnd of field "fHtmlEditor" to Italic
      set the foregroundColor of char varStart to varEnd of field "fHtmlEditor" to "#404040"
    else if varTagType is "script" then
      set the foregroundColor of char varStart to varEnd of field "fHtmlEditor" to "#ff0000"
    else
      --set the textstyle of char varStart to varEnd of field "fHtmlEditor" to Bold
      set the foregroundColor of char varStart to varEnd of field "fHtmlEditor" to "#0000ff"
    end if

  put varStart + 1 into varCharIndex
  end repeat

For some reason it only finds the first instance of what I'm looking for, even though I'm setting the chars to skip using the position plus 1 of the last found instance. And it gets stuck in an endless loop, so I put a loop counter in there to stop it at 100 until I can find out what the heck i did wrong.

Is the offset() not good for working directly on the edit element as I have in my code? Should I pass the data in the edit element into a variable and use the variable in my above code, then set the chunks in my edit from the results from using the variable?

Or... did I just simply do something silly or miss something up there that I'm gonna slap my forehead for?

Thanks,
~Garrett

Garrett · Post by **Garrett** » Thu Feb 05, 2009 10:21 pm

I'm still racking my brain on this

This is what I've tried since the above

Code: Select all

  put 0 into varStartIndex
  put 0 into varEndIndex
  put 0 into varTempTimer
  put field "fHtmlEditor" into varData

  repeat until offset(numToChar(60),varData,varStartIndex) is 0 or varTempTimer > 100
put varTempTimer + 1 into varTempTimer
    put offset(numToChar(60),varData,varStartIndex) into varStart
    put offset(numToChar(62),varData,varEndIndex) into varEnd

put varStart && varEnd && varStartIndex into field "temptestfield"

    set the textstyle of char varStart to varEnd of field "fHtmlEditor" to plain
    set the foregroundColor of char varStart to varEnd of field "fHtmlEditor" to "#0000ff"
    put varStart + 1 into varStartIndex
    put varEnd + 1 into varEndIndex
  end repeat
answer "Done checking for syntax highlighting"

And still the same result. It only hits the first instance. Is the itemoffset affected by spaces? Meaning it only checks the string until it hits a space?

Thanks for any help or info,
~Garrett

Garrett · Post by **Garrett** » Thu Feb 05, 2009 10:35 pm

Well, I can't see anything wrong with the code. I can't think of anything else to try using offset(), so I'm a gonna have to go back to looping through the whole edit element char for char as i was before since offset() isn't doing what I thought it was suppose to do

Mark · Post by **Mark** » Thu Feb 05, 2009 10:46 pm

Hi Garrett,

An offset function like

offset(myString,myData,myIndex)

always returns the position of the found char relative to char myIndex. To find the actual position of the next character, you need to add myIndex (sometimes plus or minus 1, depending on your exact approach) to the value returned by the offset function.

Best,

Mark

Garrett · Post by **Garrett** » Thu Feb 05, 2009 10:59 pm

OMG! LOL, you're kidding.. So if I did offset("a","abcabc",2) it would return 2 instead of 4?

Garrett · Post by **Garrett** » Thu Feb 05, 2009 11:15 pm

See, I just knew I was going to feel like a moron when someone pointed out what was up with what I had... Doh!!

Mark, thanks very much, it works as it should and faster than what I had originally.

Now I can put some code back into that for the actual syntax highlighting, and this time, less bad code too. I saw some of the mistakes I had made in my original code while trying to figure out how to use the offset().

Again, many thanks!
~Garrett