Issue #3320 has been updated by dgutov (Dmitry Gutov). All examples in this bug work fine for me with ruby-mode from the Emacs tree. Not sure when they were fixed. ---------------------------------------- Bug #3320: emacs ruby-mode.el font-lock fails on symboled string ending with ? https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/3320#change-34382 Author: zev (Zev Blut) Status: Assigned Priority: Normal Assignee: nobu (Nobuyoshi Nakada) Category: Target version: 1.9.4 ruby -v: 1.9.2 (trunk and 1.8.7)+ =begin Fontification breaks when emacs sees a symbol like :'this is a symbol?' example code: ---------- class EmacsExample :symbol 'this is a test' 'is this a test?' "Can this be a test" :'this is an error?' def bar @help end end ---- I have a very hacked fix in ruby-font-lock-syntactic-keywords for ;; the last $', $", $` in the respective string is not variable ;; the last ?', ?", ?` in the respective string is not ascii code ("\\(^\\|[\[ \t\n<+\(,=:]\\)\\(['\"`]\\)\\(\\\\.\\|\\2\\|[^'\"`\n\\\\]\\)*?\\\\?[?$]\\(\\2\\)" (2 (7 . nil)) (4 (7 . nil))) by adding : in the above matches with space tabs L etc... See the attached patch I am not sure this is the proper fix, but it fixes the above example. Thanks, Zev =end -- http://bugs.ruby-lang.org/