yours doesnt check for quote's i.e. "string"
Darre1,

This was only the section of my code that searches for the keywords, i also have a routine that searches for comments and quotes. I have also made some modifications to this version to account for numbers, "_", and other special chars.

For the real time color formatting, I only trigger the event when the user hits the enter key right now, but it will account for whenever the user changes lines and something has changed.

in your FormatCode sub you have a tmpRTB parameter that you send to it, but then you dont send it to the HighlightText sub, in that sub ut uses frmMain.rtbFormat. just a thought...
The tmprtb is the RTB to be formatted. IN the format code routine, all of the text is copied to frmMain.rtbFormat, then copied back to tmprtb after all the formatting has been completed.

Thanks for all you help,