The KEYWORDS tag, which must be placed inside a RULES tag and can only appear once, specifies a list of keywords to highlight. Keywords are similar to SEQs, except that SEQs match anywhere in the text, whereas keywords only match whole words. Words are considered to be runs of text separated by non-alphanumeric characters.

The KEYWORDS tag does not define any attributes.

Each child element of the KEYWORDS tag is an element whose name is a token type, and whose content is the keyword to highlight. For example, the following rule highlights the most common Java keywords:

<KEYWORDS>
  <KEYWORD1>if</KEYWORD1>
  <KEYWORD1>else</KEYWORD1>
  <KEYWORD3>int</KEYWORD3>
  <KEYWORD3>void</KEYWORD3>
</KEYWORDS>