nextthing.org

I’m stuck at home this weekend with my car in the shop. Lacking transportation, and being a programmer, I decided to start hacking on my weblog. Since I plan on posting code here (sporadically), having some way to present it all gussied up with syntax highlighting will come in handy, provided it’s not a big hassle.

I’ve recently come to appreciate the GNU enscript project. It’s a great example of a Unix program which solves a specific problem in a very general way. This generality is provided by the states language and interpreter which is part of the project. Since GNU enscript ships with OS X, I’ve started using states for a few little text processing tasks which require some light parsing work.

As such, I recently hacked up a version of the states file that ships with GNU enscript to output XHTML in addition to its HTML 2.0 output “face”. Today I added a PHP highlighter to my file and, cribbing heavily from Scott Yang’s enscript syntax highlighter for WordPress, cooked up a WordPress plugin which uses states to do the syntax highlighting.

So, feel free to go ahead and download and install my States Syntax Highlighter plugin and my enscript.st file.

Once installed, one can either include source code like so:
<code lang="sh"> #!/bin/sh echo "Hello world!"; </code> Download this code: /code/10a.txt

Which produces output like:

Or like so:
<code lang="html" file="10c.txt" /> Download this code: /code/10b.txt

Which looks like:
#!/bin/sh echo "Hello world!"; Download this code: /code/10c.txt

The first method attempts to highlight code between the code tags. There are various reasons why this way doesn't work very well. Hence the second method, which highlights code from files in a predefined directory on the server. This actually solves a whole bunch of problems, and makes posting code a lot easier. It also has the nice side effect of enabling me to provide a link to the raw code, an idea I've blatantly stolen from Dunstan Orchard.

Valid values for lang are: ada, asm, awk, c, changelog, cpp, diff, diffu, delphi, elisp, fortran, haskell, html, idl, java, javascript, mail, makefile, nroff, objc, pascal, perl, postscript, php, python, scheme, sh, sql, states, synopsys, tcl, verilog, vhdl, and vba. These correspond, with my own addition of php, to the descriptions on enscript's highlightings page.

If you feed the plugin a lang attribute it doesn't recognize, it will just ignore it and pass the code on through unchanged. The lang attribute should be case insensitive, so don't worry about typing "PHP" instead of "php".

One last example:
- (void) andrewDidFinishCoding: (NSNotification *) aNotification andItsReallyLate: (BOOL) isLate orIsItJustReallyEarly: (BOOL) yupEarly { if (isLate && !yupEarly) { NSLog(@"Bah, humbug, I just need more caffeine."); [self maybeIShouldGoToSleep]; } // ... if/else/what? if (yupEarly && !isLate) { NSlog(@"4 O'what in the morning?"); [self ifIStayUpALittleLongerItWillBeMorning]; } /* * Wheee... multiline comments. */ if (yupEarly && isLate) { [self seriouslyGoToSleep: YES rightNow: YES really: YES]; } } Download this code: /code/10d.txt

Alright, time to sleep.

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 23rd, 2005 at 5:07 AM and is filed under General, Programming. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.