Bracket pair colorization in regexes

[thorn0]

From time to time I see bracket pairs in regexes get highlighted.

Probably, this is a manifestation of #132249, but it looks super useful as it improves the readability of long regexes a lot. Please consider turning this into a feature.

Version: 1.60.2 (user setup)
Commit: 7f6ab54
Date: 2021-09-22T12:00:31.514Z
Electron: 13.1.8
Chrome: 91.0.4472.164
Node.js: 14.16.0
V8: 9.1.269.39-electron.0
OS: Windows_NT x64 10.0.19043

[ghost]

This would be very useful for long/complicated/nested regex's. I would assume it would ignore literal brackets like \(, \[, etc.

[gjsjohnmurray]

/assign @hediet

[hediet]

I would assume it would ignore literal brackets like (, [, etc.

This makes it much more complex and unfeasable for the existing bracket pair detection infrastructure.

I think this feature is best implemented by an extension.

Regular expressions are usually very short.
A TypeScript (/JavaScript) language service plugin could use the AST to detect where regexps are.
A package such as https://www.npmjs.com/package/regexpp could be used to parse the regexp.
You can then use decorations to colorize the regular expression.

[ghost]

This makes it much more complex and unfeasable for the existing bracket pair detection infrastructure.

Huh I thought that would make it easer as you would have logical pairs that are guaranteed to have a closing bracket right?

[hediet]

Huh I thought that would make it easer

What about [)]? The regex is not tokenized itself (the regex is a single token), so the bracket matching infrastructure does not know which characters are brackets and which aren't.

[ghost]

The regex is not tokenized itself (the regex is a single token)

That clears up the confusion