Comment token inside string

In pig etc. /* begins a block comment. 开发者_Python百科If I put this in a regex string 'blah/blah/*', emacs thinks this is a block comment and syntax highlighting goes to hell. I am not familiar with elisp but I am certain that is a problem with script that is providing annotations for pig.

How can I fix it?

phils pointed out a better designed major mode in the question comments, but since you are still curious: The pig mode version you are using doesn't have the syntax table set up right. The most reliable way for emacs to recognize comments and strings is to use the syntax table to map characters to start/end of comments and strings. The version you are using is trying to do it with font-lock.

You have to escape the \'es and the *. All the characters that are used by the regexp engine, have to be escaped.

If you want to match "\", you might have to write "\\" when using replace-regexp interactively and "\\\\" if you use it as a lisp function.

(I even have to escape my escapes in this comment, so there are 8 escapes in the last escape sequence above)