Improper detection of regex

[onetrev]

Not entirely sure how to describe or title this, but the issue is best seen in this screenshot:

LANGUAGE: PHP

Essentially, the text in the first if statement is properly not detected as a regex statement, but the second one is improperly detected as regex (and it's not). Because of this, depending on your code theme, the colouring will be totally wrong and can make it look like you have a coding issue so it's quite confusing.

More details and discussion of this in this issue posted in Dracula Theme.

[Ingramz]

It is quite hard to detect whether a string is going to be used as a regex or not, which is why by default all strings that are surrounded by / will be treated as regex, as that is usually the intent.

However it just came to me that we can probably disregard cases where no complex regex syntax is used, the general case being /abc/ where abc is a simple character sequence as the slashes do not really add any extra value in this case (although they are required if used in regex functions such as preg_match). It is also possible that in this case someone could also create an issue that is the exact opposite of this issue where "my regex is not being detected as such", but it could be argued that /abc/ is usually not something you'll match using a regex anyway as there are more efficient functions/algorithms for this.

@50Wliu what do you think?

[onetrev]

I like it! Good thinking! Definitely seems to be a good compromise solution as I would think the intent of /abc/ is far more often to be text rather than a regex. So this seems the right way to go. It can't be perfect but it should work for the majority.