Question

I’m writing an IDE for Python language in C++ and I have wrote a syntax highlighter for Python language syntax. but i have two problems with it:

1. my regular expression pattern for highkighting numbers is ‘\d+’. it highlights numers everywhere in code. for example it highlights ‘4’ in ‘Qt4’ and i want to it doesn’t highlight numbers in such cases.

2. my regular expression pattern for highkighting strings between two ‘”‘ is ‘\”.*\”‘. it works but with one problem.
   it even highlights cases as ‘”some text1″ some text2 “some text3″‘ and i want to it doesn’t
   highlight ‘some text2’.

what is solution for these two problems?

Answer 1

As already mentioned in the comments it may not be appropriate to use regular expressions to parse a language.

Regarding your two questions:

1. You can circumvent this behaviour by using word boundaries: \b\d+\b
2. Make your expression non-greedy: \".*?\"

Note: As already mentioned those are only workarounds and may not be correct in any case.