Word Taggers
A common requirement when using the RadSyntaxEditor is to highlight words which belong to a specific language classification type - such as keywords, operators and comments. Such predefined taggers include the CSharpTagger, VisualBasicTagger, JavaScriptTagger and SqlTagger. All of these taggers share a common base class - the WordTaggerBase class.
WordTaggerBase
The WordTaggerBase class works with the ClassificationTag and can be used when a certain word needs to be classified to one of the available classification types. Here's a list of the supported types:
- Comment
- Identifier
- Keyword
- PreprocessorKeyword
- Operator
- Literal
- CharacterLiteral
- NumberLiteral
- StringLiteral
- ExcludedCode
- WhiteSpace
Each of these types has a specified TextFormatDefinition which is used to display the matched words with a certain highlighting - foreground, background, border or underline.
The WordTaggerBase class exposes the following virtual methods:
- bool TryGetClassificationType(string word, out ClassificationType classificationType): Tries to get the classification type for the given string word.
-
Dictionary
GetWordsToClassificationTypes() : Gets a dictionary which assigns a classification type to a given word. -
IList
SplitIntoWords(string value) : Splits the current line into a collection of words. These processed words are then assigned proper classification types in the GetTags method.
By inheriting the WordTaggerBase class you can create a tagger for your own custom language and specify custom words to be assigned to the list of available classification types. You can also define your own classification types if the default ones are not sufficient for you.
A practical example of how to define a tagger for your own custom language can be found here.