tl;dr Can you collect multiple values into a single backreference?
I'm trying to write the syntax highlighting for a Textmate bundle but I've struck a problem.
There are two places a method type declaration can appear. The first is in a method declaration:
method name(param1: String, param2: String) -> String { ... }
The second is in a general type declaration:
type Name = { name(param1: String, param2: String) -> String }
Because the two declarations (from name to the last String) have exactly the same syntax, I want to place a single match for them in the repository, like so:
"method_type": {
"match": "(\w+)((\((.*)\))?(\s*(->)\s*(\w+))?)?"
"captures": { ... }
}
The problem I'm having is how to capture the multiple parameters (currently caught with the placeholder .*). I could replace it with this (If anyone has a better solution for matching comma-separated values then I would appreciate it):
((\w+\s*(:\s*\w+)?\s*,\s*)*\w+\s*(:\s*\w+)?))?
But the problem with this is that the second capture (all of the parameters before commas) only matches the last capture as per standard regular expression behaviour, so only the last two parameters will ever be captured within that subexpression.
I can't use the begin and end markers instead because all of the declaration apart from the initial name is optional, so there's no well-defined end to the pattern. The captures dictionary does not accept patterns or include values inside of it. Is there a way to individually match all of the parameters (as opposed to the current behaviour, which just matches all of them at once)?