Highlighting the source code of your applications on the web pages is an interesting job to any programmer/coder, for showing the simpler look out to all audiences. And this feature has also been supported by many JavaScript projects/applications that are free to use.
However, in this JavaScript tutorial, the author guides you how to use highlight_string
function, in the PHP programming language, to create a simple tool for highlighting your application source code. Please go to the full post page for more details.
- Demo
- Enlarge
- Reload
- New window
Free iPage Web Hosting for First Year NOW
If you're still looking for a reliable web host provider with affordable rates, why you don't take a little of time to try iPage, only with $1.89/month, included $500+ Free Extra Credits for the payment of 24 months ($45)?
Over 1,000,000+ existisng customers can not be wrong, definitely you're not, too! More important, when you register the web hosting at iPage through our link, we're going to be happy for resending a full refund to you. That's awesome! You should try iPage web hosting for FREE now! And contact us for anything you need to know about iPage.
PHP has a cool function that automatically highlights PHP code called highlight_string(); Theoretically this could be used to roll your own code highlighting on a site, rather than rely on JavaScript or some kind of external service to do it. In this article I'll show you the basics of how it works, then extended it with a few tricks. Since JavaScript is so similar to PHP in syntax, we can trick the function into highlighting JavaScript code as well. Then finally how we can bust out some smarts to auto-tab the code.
Special thanks to Benjamin Mayo (Darren Beige) who wrote the format_javascript() function we'll check out below.
Basic Usage
The highlight_string() function just accepts a string, which must begin with <?php and end with ?>. by default it echos/prints the line.
<?php highlight_string('<?php
$i = 1;
function rockOut() {
alert("wah wah wah");
}
?>'); ?>
The resulting HTML is:
<pre id="code_highlighted"><code><span style="color: #0000BB">
<span style="color: #0000BB"><script type="text/javascript">
</span><span style="color: #007700">if (</span><span style="color: #0000BB">true</span><span style="color: #007700">) {
echo </span><span style="color: #DD0000">'The value is true'</span><span style="color: #007700">;
} else {
echo </span><span style="color: #DD0000">'The value is false'</span><span style="color: #007700">;
}
</span><span style="color: #0000BB"></script></span>
</span>
Which looks like this:
Pretty wild eh? If you'd rather have that string returned rather than printed, just pass TRUE as a second parameter.
Trick it into highlighting JavaScript
Benjamin Mayo (Darren Beige) put together a PHP function that would trick PHP into highlighting JavaScript code instead of exclusively PHP. Beyond that, it also applies proper tab indentation of code, despite what is present in the file. For example, even if the original code was completely flush left like this, the output will be nicely indented.
Check out the demo to see it in action:
How it works
The indentation occurs by adding line breaks after every brace and semicolon if they are not already there. This puts each statement on it's own line, priming the code. However, the main bulk of the code for indentation happens in the loop itself.
$lineecho = $line;
if (substr_count($line, "\t") != $tab) {
$lineecho = str_replace("\t", "", trim($lineecho));
$lineecho = str_repeat("\t", $tab) . $lineecho;
}
$tab = $tab + substr_count($line, "{") - substr_count($line, "}");
The block works by keeping a count (in the variable $tab) of how many tab characters ("\t") there are on the previous line. The current line is counted for tabs using the substr_count() function. If the two values do not match, the echoed line is padded by the $tab value. This now means that the number of tab characters at the start of the line matches the number in the $tab variable. After this procedure, the new $tab value is calculated by taking the current $tab and adding on the number of opening braces found subtracting the number of closing braces.
The output code is in <pre> tags so the tabs display properly.
Usage
Let's say you wanted to highlight a big chunk of JavaScript code that lived in a file. Easy, just include the PHP file/function, grab the contents of that file, and run the function on it.
<?php
include_once('format_javascript.php');
$BigJavaScriptString = file_get_contents('path/to/javascript.js');
echo format_javascript($testBigJS);
?>
So the deal here is if you want to highlight code this way, you need to get it into a string variable. If you wanted to use this in say, a CMS, you would need to be able to save and run PHP inside the saved content areas. Or, you'd need to write some fancy regex stuff to parse content and look for particular tags and be able to extract the innards into a variable for highlighting. Above my head.
If you are interested in how you might use this to highlight other languages, check out the comment thread in the documentation, which has some attempts at highlighting XML and HTML.
- Sent (0)
- New
Save up to 630$ when buy new iPhone 15
GateIO.gomymobi.com
Free Airdrops to Claim, Share Up to $150,000 per Project
https://tooly.win
Open tool hub for free to use by any one for every one with hundreds of tools
chatGPTaz.com, chatGPT4.win, chatGPT2.fun, re-chatGPT.com
Talk to ChatGPT by your mother language
Dall-E-OpenAI.com
Generate creative images automatically with AI
AIVideo-App.com
Render creative video automatically with AI