Batch Script syntax highlighting issues

[aeschli]

From @Kroc on April 6, 2018 8:35

Issue Type: Bug

There are a handful of highlighting issues with Windows Batch files:

• [x] ECHO: is not recognised, when ECHO. is; ECHO: is faster as it does not do a file lookup! -- see: https://ss64.com/nt/echo.html

• [x] The OFF in ECHO OFF is not highlighted

• [x] The following code gets highlighting confused (the "$... seems to throw it off)

  

• [x] No space between GOTO and the label name does not highlight correctly; i.e. GOTO:EOF

• [x] CLS keyword is not highlighted

• [x] EQU / NOT and other comparison operators are not highlighted

• [ ] IN & DO are not highlighted

• [x] command concatenator &, and the pipe operators >, | are not highlighted nor pipe numbers for redirection, e.g. >NUL 2>&1 (a common way to suppress all output)

• [x] error-suppressor @ is not highlighted in any way; this needs to be highlighted when used with a command, but not within 'strings' (which may or may not be quoted, according to command used)

• [x] ENABLEEXTENSIONS / DISABLEDELAYEDEXPANSION etc. not highlighted along with SETLOCAL

• [x] Syntax break-down here: (looks like the quoted paren-escape failed to be noticed)

  

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Aside: What would be the best way to broach a discussion on using a PEG-based parser, rather than the regex-infused TextMate system for VSCode? Windows Batch files happen to be one of the best examples of extremely complex mode-like behaviour that would be easily and elegantly handled by a real state machine based approach using PEG/EBNF grammars. Grammar based parsing would also be readily shareable between language servers and other external software.

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VS Code version: Code 1.22.1 (950b8b0d37a9b7061b6f0d291837ccc4015f5ecd, 2018-04-06T02:26:57.615Z) OS version: Windows_NT x64 10.0.16299

Extensions: none

Copied from original issue: Microsoft/vscode#47297

[mmims]

I've started looking at some of these issues, but there's quite a bit to go through here. Some of the issues (i.e. EQU, NOT, @, redirection characters) can be attributed to the syntax theme. They are scoped, but if the syntax theme you are using does not have a style definition for that scope, they will appear not be highlighted.

I will get fixes out for some of the easier issues to fix. The others might take some time. As mentioned, batch files have a rather complex "language" that is becoming increasingly difficult to express using these regex based definitions.

[Kroc]

OK, thank you very much; I am using the default theme and no extensions -- so the lack of applied colours should be resolve upstream