How do I syntax highlight in a richtextbox control AS THE USER TYPES and USING A String[] keywords. I will be publishing a lightweight notepad to the web soon and I want it to have syntax highlighting. I am using Windows forms. Can someone post a code example?
RichTextBox syntax highlighting (talks about RichTextBox itself - minimal features but exactly what you asked for here)
A textbox/richtextbox that has syntax highlighting? [C#] (talks mostly about other ways of doing it)
The Scintilla control is an excellent source code editor that includes syntax highlighting amongst a whole range of other features. You can embed it in your own app and there is a .NET wrapper available.
With Scintilla you can specify the keywords and it will then apply the syntax highlighting as you type.
Are you using WinForms or WPF?
If WPF, you could have a look at AvalonEdit. It's free and open source, and it's used in SharpDevelop (open source IDE).
You can change the font of selected words in the richtextbox. Take a look at the Select and SelectedFont properties of the control.
But essentially, you need to iterate through the words, check if a word is present in your keywords, and then change the font, using the above-mentioned properties.
Not exactly an answer to your question, but have you looked at the text editor component from SharpDevelop? It's quite lightweight (<200kB IIRC), can be easily embedded in WinForms applications and has syntax highlighting for several languages built in.
Otherwise, you might want to look at this CodeProject page. It reformats the RTF while you type, which is not very efficient for large files, and it contains a few creepy catch (Exception) { } blocks, so I'm not sure if I would use it in a life-critical application, but it's definitely a good starting point to see how it can be done.
Syntax highlighting is not an easy task to perform efficiently. Many solutions you can find (like the ones involving modification of RTF) are a one time solution. If you want to highlight and un-highlight words on the fly during edition, your code has to be ready for it. I would not reinvent the wheel and use ICSharp.TextEditor or alike to solve your problem.
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Im writing a simple code editor just like visual studio code editor.
btw i have a textbox and wanna know how can i underline syntactical errors?
i`v searched the web, but did not find something usefull. any one got any refernce of documentation for C# compiler to help me in this topic?
thanks all and sorry for my bad english..
If you're doing this for a real-world scenario, there are good commercial options available. You need to look at using the CodeDom classes which can take your input text and convert it into an object model which can then be compiled into an assembly.
If there are compiler errors, they will be returned as a collection of CompilerError objects. These will tell you the line number, character number, and error message, so you can display the error.
There are significant drawbacks to using CodeDom, however. It is older technology and has not been updated to keep pace with the language changes so there are limitations in what it can parse. If you want to write your own parser, you need to look at language tools like lexx and yacc or Roslyn.
With a simple textbox control you certainly cannot do that. At least you need to use a RichTextBox control (comes in a variety of flavors, for WPF, WinForms, from Office...), to do some code formatting. As a first exercise, I would suggest you try to color keywords in your editor. That's a fairly easy task (and error recovery is not a problem) and may show you how to use the control.
I have an ANTLR grammar that defines a DSL (domain specific language). This grammar is relatively simple. It is parsing the language and outputting C code to create a very basic translator.
This language is meant to be used in C# application (typed into some sort of control, whether it be RichTextBox or a custom control) and one requirement is to have syntax highlighting for this language. I have scoured the Internet in hopes of finding some sort of information on how to accomplish this, or find a tool to make this a little easier on myself.
After not finding too much information, my best assumption would be that I need to use the ANTLR generated lexer to look at the tokens and color them accordingly. Is this the correct path of action, or is there some other method/tool to provide syntax highlighting for custom domain specific languages? If this is the correct method, how do I go about recognizing specific tokens?
If I left out any important information, please ask! Thanks!
I successfully used AvalonEdit for a similar project of mine. I just created a small editor with the correct syntax highlighting.
It is very easy and quick to get it up and running in your project. You just have to provide it with a simple XML file to document the syntax of your DSL and you will have a colored output out-of-the-box as a WPF control.
It looks like they added completion facilities since I used it, I don't have experience on that part though, but I suspect it is also very well done if the quality is the same as the colouring.
This language is meant to be used in C# application (typed into some sort of control, whether it be RichTextBox or a custom control) and one requirement is to have syntax highlighting for this language.
Consider using Scintilla for your control. It's a text control for IDE-style text editing. Notepad++ uses it for its text control, as does the SciTE IDE from which it originates. I've used it in a small, custom IDE project written in C# using an unofficial .NET-specific version -- I think it was ScintillaNET.
Scintilla supports custom keyword highlighting and also a variety of programmable features like squiggly-line underlining and things like that.
If you have a control that you'd rather use, I think it's reasonable to use a small ANTLR lexer to produce tokens for you. Each token contains the line number, starting character position, source text, and token type -- everything you'd need to know what to highlight and how. The only hassle would be running the text through the lexer each time the text is changed. There are efficient ways to do that without re-lexing the entire document, but it's still something to keep in mind.
If anyone knows the name for these types of comments, if one exists, please modify my question.
I frequently see comment blocks such as this:
/**********************************************
* Some Important Text Here
**********************************************/
Sometimes they can look like this:
/**********************************************
********* Some Important Text Here *******
**********************************************/
I've also seen them prettier than that.
They seem useful for noting sections of code, and important messages, such as license blocks. But, I feel like there *must* be a "lazy" way of doing this in Visual Studio, or at least an addon, because typing them manually is a pain.
Thanks!
P.S. If this feature or a point-and-click way to do it doesn't exist, then I know what VS plugin I'm writing next.
create a code snippet for them
You could perhaps look at GhostDoc, it is great for writing neat, clean, consistent style commenting in your code. It uses XML markup, and can later be exported for documentation.
If you want fixed-text blocks, then add a Code Snippet for each one you need.
If you want auto-generated documentation blocks for absolutely any code element, then you might like to try my addin, AtomineerUtils. (Similar to GhostDoc, but with significantly more features, a much better documentation generation engine, better formatting control (e.g. word wrapping of comments and documentation comments) and support for many more programming languages and documentation block styles).
You could create a toolbar macro which inserts that text at your cursor position when you click on the toolbar icon.
MS Word has this capability in its Hebrew and Arabic versions. I would like to achieve this in a windows desktop application, using .Net (may be with win-api calls).
As explained in the link provided by Otaku here, current rich text edit controls can not handle this (unless you go for the hack OP in that Q did, which did not seem like a very good solution).
You could write code to do this manually yourself, ditching the text edit control completely, but that would probably mean a lot of work. It took Microsoft years to get support for combining diacritics working properly in MSWord. I would search for open source software that has this capability, and look at how other developers have done it. It might be hard to find, though, and you would likely have to step outside .NET-land. Maybe OpenOffice can do this?
This discussion might also be of help.
I am afraid that you will find, though, that you'll have to manually parse the Unicode and assign colors to the correct glyphs. If you want to be complete, that is one heck of a job.
In a C# console app I have the need to extract the text from an RTF string, add some more text to it, and then convert it back into RTF. I have been able to do this using the System.Windows.Forms.RichTextBox class, but I find it a bit odd to use a Forms control in a non-Forms app. Any better way to do this?
Doing anything with RTF is pretty difficult unless you're using the windows forms. As stated above, using forms is the easiest way to go.
You could write something yourself, but the RTF spec is pretty complicated.
http://www.biblioscape.com/rtf15_spec.htm
Or you could use a conversion DLL / ActiveX object of which there is a large number available.
http://www.sautinsoft.com/
Or - If you're doing this from Linux, there are also tools available. A cursory glance throws up UnRTF
http://www.gnu.org/software/unrtf/unrtf.html
I haven't included stuff to turn text back to RTF because I think the RTF specification treats and formats text correctly.
I think you should just shake this feeling of "odd". There's nothing odd about it.
It depends on what you mean by 'better'. You are already using the simplest and easiest way of doing it.
There is nothing wrong with using an user-interface control in a console application or even in a web application. The Windows controls are part of the .NET Framework, might as well use them. These controls do not need to be hosted in "forms" in order to work.
Reinventing the wheel, using DLL/ActiveX/OCX, and using Linux are simply not practical answers to your question. The better way is...do what you know. There is actually a performance and maintainence benefit to using existing framework methods then using the suggested alternatives.