Adding Support for Visual Basic to Exuberent Ctags
jEdit has a great source code navigation plugin called Tags which uses Exuberant Ctags. By default Ctags doesn't support VB, which I'm seeing a lot of lately, but it does allow one to add support for laguages using regular expressions.
I added the following to c:\ctags.cnf:
--langdef=vb --langmap=vb:.bas.cls.ctl.frm.vbs --regex-vb=/^(Public|Private|\b)[ \t]*Sub[ \t]+([a-zA-Z0-9_]+)/\2/s,subroutine/i --regex-vb=/^(Public|Private|\b)[ \t]*Function[ \t]+([a-zA-Z0-9_]+)/\2/f,function/i --regex-vb=/^(Public|Private)[ \t]+([a-zA-Z0-9_]+)[ \t]+As[ \t]+/\2/v,variable/i --regex-vb=/^(Public|Private|\b)[ \t]*Const[ \t]+([a-zA-Z0-9_]+)[ \t]+(As|=)[ \t]+/\2/c,const/i --regex-vb=/^(Public|\b)[ \t]*Property[ \t]*(Get|Let|Set)[ \t]+([a-zA-Z0-9_]+)/\3/n,name/i --regex-vb=/^(Public|Private|\b)[ \t]*Enum[ \t]+([a-zA-Z0-9_]+)/\2/e,enum/i --regex-vb=/^([a-zA-Z_]+):/\1/l,label/i
These expressions probably aren't perfect, but I've found them to work pretty well. If you've got suggestions or improvements, please send them along.
Example output:
C:\Code\CASS\SMSSource>ctags -RV RECURSING into directory "." ignoring .\.cvsignore (unknown language) ignoring .\360.ico (unknown language) OPENING .\Advertiser.cls as vb language file OPENING .\Advertisers.cls as vb language file OPENING .\Affidavit.cls as vb language file ^C C:\Code\CASS\SMSSource>
Here's a screen shot of the plugin in action:
![[screen shot of Ctags w/VB in jEdit]](/files/weblog/2003/apr/17/vbctags.jpg)