Javascript string delimiter not escaped properly in listings

Question

I am trying to use listings to display Javascript code. Following the replies to another question, I worked out the following code:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{listings}
\lstdefinelanguage{JavaScript}{
    keywords={break, case, catch, continue, debugger, default, delete, do, else, 
              finally, for, function, if, in, instanceof, new, return, switch, 
              this, throw, try, typeof, var, void, while, with},
    morekeywords={class, export, boolean, throw, implements, import, this},
    comment=[l]{//},
    morecomment=[s]{/*}{*/},
    string=[b]",
    morestring=[b]',
    sensitive=true
}

\begin{document}
\begin{lstlisting}[breaklines={true}, language={Javascript}, numbers=left]
var string = "This is special' string";
var alpha = document.selection;
str = str.replace(/[!.:?,;\"]/g, '');
dictionary_access ("" + t );
var alpha = document.selection;
\end{lstlisting}
\end{document}

However the displayed listing does not have proper formatting (whitespaces being highlighted outside the string). I guess it is because the string delimiters are not escaped properly.

listing output

Someone else also had a similar issue with Basic. I have tried replacing [b] in string=[b]" with [bd], [m] for both single and double quote. Also tried using string=[s]"" but no success.

Since you have some responses below that seem to answer your question, please consider marking one of them as ‘Accepted’ by clicking on the tickmark below their vote count (see How do you accept an answer?). This shows which answer helped you most, and it assigns reputation points to the author of the answer (and to you!). It's part of this site's idea to identify good questions and answers through upvotes and acceptance of answers. — jub0bs, Jan 19 '14 at 12:19
Somewhat related: http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/164858/how-can-i-highlight-a-freestanding-regexp-in-string-style/164867#164867 — jub0bs, Apr 08 '14 at 18:24

senshin · Answer 1 · 2013-08-15T10:35:08.067

3

It looks like what's going on is that listings is failing to recognize that the double quote in line 3 is inside a "string" (actually a regex, of course). As such, the double quote on line 3 opens a string literal that is closed by the first double quote on line 4, but then a new string literal is opened by the second double quote on line 4.

I think you should be able to fix this problem just by making / into a string delimiter. In other words, add

morestring=[b]/

to your \lstdefinelanguage.

There shouldn't be any issues with the interaction of " and ' with /, since / doesn't need to be escaped in "...", and vice versa.

edited Aug 15 '13 at 10:35

answered Aug 15 '13 at 10:25

senshin

231

I tried this but now have the issue that the symbol for division doesn't work for example:
number = number / 256; /* not a regex */

some_other_number = number / 2;
– Betsalel Williamson Sep 11 '19 at 00:12

Javascript string delimiter not escaped properly in listings

1 Answers1