Thanks Lex. Sorry for the late reply.

You seemed to be returning "is this a warning or not", so thats a
boolean condition that can be tested locally and returned as such.
Returning a pointer to part of the message and then testing it in code
far far away is likely to be confusing for maintenance.

I agree and I understand your concern. The problem I have is if I modify the functions (msgwin_parse_compiler_error_line and others in the chain) to return a boolean value(whether its an error or warning) I have no way to test whether the function continues to work for all the filetypes supported by geany. Functions like msgwin_parse_compiler_error_line and others are extremely generic and is supposed to work for all the filetypes. I have tested my code for C, C++, Java, Python and LaTex and it seems to work. This brings me to my second point, can you please share with me any testing code that you guys might have?

Then it would be best to make a pull request on github so we can
attach comments to the source, thanks.

I have made the pull request. Again thank you for being so patient and helping me understand all the nitty-gritties of geany source code.

Thanks,

Shankhoneer Chakrovarty