Vim does a lot of optimization of regular expressions, but I do not know how it would perform in this case. I would just try it and see. If it does not work well, that would be a good reason to try :syn match instead of :match .
HTH --Benji Fisher On Sun, Aug 06, 2006 at 09:59:31AM -0700, Mohsin wrote: > I can try making a large regexp. I was under the impression that > alternating regexps can be exponentially slow. Is %l %c %v matching > is implemented in constant time? ie. Does vim try to match the regexp > at every point - or it can optimize and start matching from the given line? > Nothing to do with implementation just the hard theoretical limit, > I am afraid, this might not work on slower machines. > > thanks > mohsin > > On 8/5/06, Benji Fisher <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > > I think that Tony mentioned > > > >:help /\| > > > >in a previous post, but maybe you missed it. I just tried > > > >:highlight User1 term=bold,underline cterm=bold,underline > >gui=bold,underline > >:match User1 /\%>3l.\%<7l\&\%>3v.\%<7v\|\%>12l.\%<18l\&\%<33v.\%>20v/ > > ^^ > > > >and it marked two rectangular regions in this e-mail. I admit that this > >is just a proof of concept, not very convenient to use. It should not > >be too hard to store a List of Lists, each inner list giving the > >boundaries of a rectangle (four Numbers), and then to write a function > >that processes this list to :execute the appropriate :match statement. > >Then another function could add or remove Lists to the outer List. > > > >:help List " vim 7.0 only > >:help :for " ditto > > > > It is also possible to use ":syn match" instead of ":match". Each > >approach has some advantages. Without knowing how you would want to use > >such a feature, I do not know which would be more appropriate. > > > >HTH --Benji Fisher > >
