Regex restriction in asciidoc.kak

Complaints & Improvements
1

I see that in the asciidoc.kak file, the regex of the highlighter for italicized text is:

\b_[^\n]+?_\b

meaning that between the underscore delimiters, the text to be italicized cannot comprise a line return, \n.

Question: why prohibiting line returns? AFAIK, the asciidoc spec allows italicized (or bold) text to span multiple lines. Was this done for performance reasons (e.g., to avoid scanning a 1GB asciidoc document with a single stray underline)?

Suggestion: what about allowing italicized text over multiple lines, while fixing a reasonable limit to how many characters should be scanned before giving up on a stray underline? For example, with a limit of 3 * 80 = 240 characters (meaning at most 3 lines of 80 chars each), the regex for italicized text would be:

\b_.{1,240}?_\b

This would allow a (long) journal title in italics, for example, to span over 2 or 3 lines.

2

Maybe for simplicity and to avoid false positive.

3

Makes sense :-). But, can you think of a strong disadvantage of my proposal? It would allow for italics/bold straddling lines, and would still limit false positives to some extent.

4

If other regions are correctly defined (such as code blocks) it could be a region like we have for quoted strings in programming languages no?

A simple regex doesn’t look correct to represent italicized text because other formats such as links can be contained in it and regex highlighter will eat the whole.