Emacs Lisp: Find Matching Bracket Character

By Xah Lee. Date: . Last updated: .

Given a bracket character, how to find the character that matches it?

For example:

[see Unicode: Brackets, Quotes «»「」【】《》]

Solution

(defun xah-get-matching-bracket (@bracket-char-string)
  "Returns a char in string form matching @bracket-char-string.
 For example, if input is \"[\" returns \"]\".
This works with any unicode bracket, such as 「」【】〈〉etc.
This function uses the current syntax table to determine what's brackets and the matching char.
If the input is not a bracket, returns nil.

URL `http://xahlee.info/emacs/emacs/elisp_find_matching_bracket_char.html'
Version 2017-01-16"
  (interactive)
  (let (($syntableValue (aref (syntax-table) (string-to-char @bracket-char-string))))
    (if (or
         (eq (car $syntableValue ) 4) ; syntax table, code 4 is open bracket
         (eq (car $syntableValue ) 5) ; syntax table, code 5 is close bracket
         )
        (char-to-string (cdr $syntableValue))
      nil
      )))

;; test
(xah-get-matching-bracket "(" ) ; ")"
(xah-get-matching-bracket ")" ) ; "("
(xah-get-matching-bracket "[" ) ; "]"
(xah-get-matching-bracket "]" ) ; "["
(xah-get-matching-bracket "「" ) ; "」"
(xah-get-matching-bracket "」" ) ; "「"
(xah-get-matching-bracket "【" ) ; "】"
(xah-get-matching-bracket "】" ) ; "【"

How does it work?

For bracket characters, the matching character is stored in emacs syntax table. So, we just need to extract that info.

[see Emacs Lisp: Syntax Table]

Syntax table is implemented as a character table, which is implemented as a elisp vector type, but instead of integer for index, it uses character for index. (in elisp, character type is just integer too, of the character's Unicode codepoint in decimal.)

[see Emacs Lisp: Vector]

Each element of the syntax table is a cons pair (syntax-code . matching-char).

The syntax-code is a integer that represents the syntax class. The matching-char, if not nil, is the matching character.

Syntax Table Internals (ELISP Manual)