Properly highlight stringified JSON

[jez]

The problem was code like this:

{
 "foo": "{\"bar\": \"qux\"}",
 "_":  "└────────┘ <- jsonKeywordMatch (!)"
}

before, we'd highlight the value of the "foo" key as if it were JSON, because jsonKeywordMatch would match against the region shown above.

By adding the \\\@<! before the " we ensure that a \ doesn't come before the "; a keyword must be terminated by an unescaped quote.

[jez]

@elzr bump! Let me know if there's anything I should change or explain better 🙂

[inkarkat]

I also ran into this problem.

For the fix, you can avoid the negative lookbehind simply by swapping the branches in the preceding group (i.e. \(\\\"\|[^"]\)\+" instead of "\([^"]\|\\\"\)\+), so that an escaped quote always gets matched by the group, and the quote part cannot leak out of the group.

Complete line:

syn match  jsonStringMatch /"\(\\\"\|[^"]\)\+"\ze[[:blank:]\r\n]\{-}[,}\]]/ contains=jsonString

[inkarkat]

@jez Why did you close this? As far as I can see, the fix hasn't been included anywhere? Is there another fork that is actively maintained?

[jez]

Why did you close this?

It was cluttering up my list of open PRs; I wanted to get to "inbox zero"

Is there another fork that is actively maintained?

I use submodules + vim-pathogen to manage my Vim plugins, so I just configured it to point at my fork instead of at elzr/vim-json:

https://github.com/jez/dotfiles/commit/27c9d9899baa104af4886dcb07bbed38a420531e

Feel free to point your config here (but I won't take feature requests or bug fixes). Also feel free to make another PR with these contents yourself.

[inkarkat]

Ah, thanks for letting me know. I've raised the issue that @elzr apparently doesn't maintain this syntax any longer on the vim_dev mailing list; it would be great if someone else picks up maintenance, wouldn't it?!

---

Regarding your fix: I'd mentioned above that there's a simpler fix than what you've committed. It avoids the negative lookbehind.

[inkarkat]

There's actually an even simpler fix for this issue that doesn't require modification of the regexp, just shifting around of the individual :syntax commands. It's been directly included in the Vim runtime (as vim/vim#4625) and the syntax plugin has been marked as being without a maintainer.