For syntactic analysis, such as in indentation, often the useful thing is to compute the syntactic state corresponding to a given buffer position. This function does that conveniently.
This function returns the parser state that the parser would reach at position pos starting from the beginning of the visible portion of the buffer. See Parser State, for a description of the parser state.
The return value is the same as if you call the low-level parsing
function parse-partial-sexp to parse from the beginning of the
visible portion of the buffer to pos (see Low-Level Parsing). However, syntax-ppss uses caches to speed up the
computation. Due to this optimization, the second value (previous
complete subexpression) and sixth value (minimum parenthesis depth) in
the returned parser state are not meaningful.
This function has a side effect: it adds a buffer-local entry to
before-change-functions (see Change Hooks) for
syntax-ppss-flush-cache (see below). This entry keeps the
cache consistent as the buffer is modified. However, the cache might
not be updated if syntax-ppss is called while
before-change-functions is temporarily let-bound, or if the
buffer is modified without running the hook, such as when using
inhibit-modification-hooks. In those cases, it is necessary to
call syntax-ppss-flush-cache explicitly.
This function flushes the cache used by syntax-ppss, starting
at position beg. The remaining arguments, ignored-args,
are ignored; this function accepts them so that it can be directly
used on hooks such as before-change-functions (see Change Hooks).