Extending ctags

Exuberant-ctags allows a user to add a new parser to ctags with --langdef=<LANG> and --regex-<LANG>=... options.

Universal-ctags follows and extends the design of Exuberant-ctags in more powerful ways, as described in the following chapters.

Universal-ctags encourages users to share the new parsers defined by their options. See optlib to know how you can share your parser definition with others.

Note that some of the new features are experimental, and will be marked as such in the documentation.

• Extending ctags with Regex parser (optlib)
  • Option files
  • Regular expression (regex) engine
  • Regex option argument flags
  • Scope tracking in a regex parser
  • Overriding the letter for file kind
  • Generating fully qualified tags automatically from scope information
  • Multi-line pattern match
  • Advanced pattern matching with multiple regex tables
  • Conditional tagging with extras
  • Adding custom fields to the tag output
  • Capturing reference tags
  • Running a guest parser with _guest regex flag
  • Submitting an optlib file to the Universal-ctags project
• ctags Internal API
  • Input text stream
  • Automatic parser guessing
  • Managing regular expression parsers
  • Parser written in C
  • Output tag stream