stop parsing symbol only ends at end of line, but pipe character is also acceptable

Open
#144 6 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

Nobody has claimed this yet.

Assessment

Difficulty
3/5
Estimated time
1-2 days
Newbie friendliness
45/100
Issue type
Bug
Clarity
Mostly clear
Activity status
Stale
Tech stack
powershell
Domain
tooling

Research direction

Start with the PowerShell tmLanguage stop-parsing rule shown in the issue and compare it with the about_Parsing behavior. Verify that parsing ends at a pipe only when the pipe is outside double-quoted constructs, while the existing end-of-line behavior remains unchanged.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

Environment
  • Editor and Version: VS Code: 1.26.1
  • Your primary theme: Monokai Dimmed
Issue Description

the stop parsing symbol, --% is set to scope all the way to the end of the line. I thought this was how the symbol worked as well, until I reread the doc on the matter (about_Parsing) and instead, it also can be terminated by the pipe character, but only if the pipe would be outside of any double-quoted constructs, as I have determined.

Its also possible to use environment variable substitution using the CMD `%variable% syntax, but if your environment variable name contains a double-quote, PowerShell processes it first, before the substitution has occurred (if it even occurs, as just like in CMD, if the variable is not found, the substitution does not occur), so its actually impossible to determine a real variable reference.

Expected Behavior

Syntax should at least support stop-parsing symbol's scope ending at a pipe, in the same manner as PowerShell actually does.

Possible tmLanguage modification:

{
	"begin": "(?<!\\w)(--%)(?!\\w)",
	"beginCaptures": {
		"1": {
			"name": "keyword.control.powershell"
		}
	},
	"end": "$|\\|",
	"patterns": [
		{
			"match": "[^\"\\x{201C}\\x{201D}]+?",
			"name": "string.unquoted.powershell"
		},
		{
			"begin": "(?:\"|\\x{201C}|\\x{201D})",
			"beginCaptures": {
				"0": {
					"name": "punctuation.definition.string.begin.powershell"
				}
			},
			"end": "(?:\"|\\x{201C}|\\x{201D})(?!\"|\\x{201C}|\\x{201D})|$",
			"endCaptures": {
				"0": {
					"name": "punctuation.definition.string.end.powershell"
				}
			},
			"name": "string.quoted.double.powershell"
		}
	],
	"comment": "This should be moved to the repository at some point."
},

I have the Unicode double-quotes included, as I determined that PowerShell treats them the same here as well as elsewhere.

I do have the intention of putting this in a PR.

Dominant language
PowerShell
Stars
151
Forks
55
PR merge metrics
No merged PRs in 30d

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

More from PowerShell/EditorSyntax

All issues in PowerShell/EditorSyntax

Similar issues

More DevTools issues

Get new issues in your inbox

A short digest of beginner-friendly GitHub issues.