SQL highlighting in Python multiline strings for VS Code

Adds automatic syntax highlight support SQL and HTML strings embedded in Python strings.

This is still under development, if you experience issues please try to help us fix them. :) Auto detecting SQL, and highlighting it properly insight Python is hard!

To limit bugs (like highlighting words that are SQL keywords in the wrong places) and ease stopping of highlight when we must, I made the following simplifications:

• The extension will not work for SQL embedded in Python comments or docstrings.
• To be considered SQL, the string must start with a SQL keyword fully capitalized or a double dash (--) denoting a comment. You can only have white spaces before the keyword. This is to avoid wrong detection of SQL in the middle of the string.
• Same goes for HTML, you must start by a tag or a comment (see the demo files for more).

Please note:

• That the demo files (docs/sql_demo.py and docs/html_demo.py) are also used to check that the extension behaves correctly in all cases. If you find a bug, please add it to the file so we can avoid regressions.
• That Python strings that contains a SQL comment at the end of the string are not support and will make highlighting bug. So query = "SELECT * FROM my_table -- WHERE col IS NOT NULL" will break everything. This is because (as far as I know at least) SQL comments ends when a line ends and the extension cannot force it to end before that. Since the extension missed the end of the string, we cannot recover from this. Note that multi-line strings are not concerned by this as long as you put the end quotes on another line. So, this will fail:

  query = """SELECT * FROM my_table
  -- WHERE col IS NOT NULL"""
  

  But this will work as expected:

  query = """SELECT * FROM my_table
  -- WHERE col IS NOT NULL
  """
  

• Likewise an unclosed HTML tag will break everything.

View on extension on the VS Code Marketplace, or source code Github.

Community

• 2021-12-13 forked from python-string-sql
• 2023-11-26 forked from better-python-string-sql