Emacs lisp semicolon character?

Question

It's a silly question, really. I want to do

(position ?; "This is a test; or is it?")

Unfortunately, the font-lock is regex based, so it highlights a part of the code as a comment.

What's the best way to handle this? At the moment, I've got either

(defconst semicolon (aref ";" 0))
(position semicolon "This is a test; or is it?")

or

(position 59 "This is a test; or is it?")

Answer 1

You should escape the semicolon with a backslash:

(position ?\; "This is a test; or is it?")