How to syntax-highlight XML in CDATA elements in Vim?

Question

Vim's syntax highlighting for XML/XSL is great, except it turns off all syntax highlighting in CDATA regions. Is there a way to turn on syntax highlighting on in CDATA regions?

At work, we have a lot of XSL code embedded within other XML documents. It would be great if I could get all of the goodness of XML editing for the embedded XSL code as well without having to temporarily remove the CDATA tags, or copy the CDATA content into a temporary file.

Example:

<root>
  <with type="xsl"><![CDATA[
      <xsl:template match="/">
          <!-- XSL content here -->
      </xsl:template>
   ]]>
  </with>
</root>

The XSL is always contained within , so there is something to match against.

We also sometimes embed Javascript inside CDATA regions as well. It would be nice to turn on Javascript syntax highlighting for those regions.

Answer 1

You would need to modify the syntax highlighting script that comes with vim (it's in /usr/share/vim/vim72/syntax/xml.vim on my system). However, I'm pretty sure this is a bad idea - you will be operating under the 'illusion' that the content of the CDATA section is actually XML and it's definitely not - as it's in a CDATA section it's just text.

In order to handle embedded javascript (which seems less risky to me) you will also need to create a modified syntax highlighter. A good place to start looking for information on how to do this would be the XHTML syntax highlighter for vim - that supports embedded languages