Thursday, April 15, 2010

Syntax Highlighting

9 Top Online Syntax Highlighting Sites

Syntax highlighting is very important especially when we want to show our code example in a blog. By enabling the syntax highlighting on the blog, readers can read the code blocks easier.

There are a lot of free and useful syntax highlighting scripts available. Most of the scripts are written using Javascripts, though some of them are powered by other programming languages such as Phyton or Ruby.

Though there are a lot of Syntax Highlighting Scripts that are powered by Javascript, today I am looking at what is available to use online without having to set up your own website or web-page. After about an hour using Goggle, I was able to come up with 9 tools to do the job. I suspect some of these tools use the same engine. Here is what I found.

GeSHi
GeSHi is a syntax highlighter for HTML, written in PHP. Basically, you input the source you want to highlight and the name of the language you want to highlight it in, and GeSHi returns the syntax-highlighted result. But it doesn't stop there - GeSHi has many powerful and unique features, including:

The ability to change the styles of any highlighted element on the fly
Use of CSS classes to reduce the amount of output produced (GeSHi can also produce a stylesheet to be used with a language on the fly)
XHTML 1.0 Strict + CSS2 compliance
Auto-caps/noncaps of keywords
Line numbering (both normal and fancy forms, see the demo
And many more!

GeSHi started as an idea to create a generic syntax highlighter for the phpBB forum system. GeSHi aims to be a simple but powerful highlighting class. Many customisable features of GeSHi facilitate speed increases, and you can easily find a balance between the amount of highlighting done and the speed in which it is done. GeSHi is an award winning piece of software - so you know it's a top quality product. Definitely one of the most powerful available.

HTML Source Code Syntax Highlighter
Probably one of the nicest online syntax highlighters you will come across. Very easy to use. The output is attractive. Uses the Actipro CodeHighlighter control to generate the markup. The control is available free to download if you want to run the highlighter on your own server. If I had to pick one to use all the time, this would be my choice.

ToHtml.com
Very basic site. Allow you to imput your script and output syntax. You can choose from ten styles for a multitude of scripts and languages. Easy to use. The first site to come up when searching using Goggle

CodeColorizer
CodeColorizer can convert your ASP, C/C++, Clipper, Delphi/Pascal, HTML, Java, JavaScript and Visual Basic source code to colorized (syntax highlighted) HTML documents. Colorized source code is easier to read and can help to document, learn, understand, debug, print and publish source code.

Qucik Highlighter
A simple to use code syntax highlighter that makes creating code sample and pages a breeze. It doesn't get any easier than this. You can specify line numbers, word-wrap and tab size. Code appears to be produced by Geshi engine.

Advanced Syntax Highlighting
If you have a need to show source code or data on your website, you can use this utility to add syntax hilighting to your output. Quite simply, syntax highlighting colorized your code based on pre-defined keywords. Use this utility to generate the html to show your code colorized for easier readability. The Syntax highlighting tool supports many languages, including PHP, HTML, Java, C, C++, ASP and more. Doesn't show you the colorized code, but allows you to copy generated code for pasting into your website.

HTML Web Syntax Highlighter
This web utility allows you to read and analyze HTML code easier, thanks to syntax highlighting and marking of closures with mouse hovering. This is important in particular when there are nested tables, and it becomes impossibe to tell which </table> belongs to which <table>, and which </tr> or </td> goes with which <tr> and <td>.

This utility also detects unresolved HTML tags, so it's helpful when something is wrong, but you have no idea what.

BlogTrog
Share your code online easily with BlogTrog CodeWindow! BlogTrog Code Window provides an extremely easy way to share code on a blog or website.

Paste your code
Select your language
Click submit
Stick your generated embed code on your website or blog

Generated code can be copied and pasted directly into your website, or you can copy and past a link to the colorized code into an email, IM, blog or website.

Syntax Highlighter
Syntax Highlighter (Code Highlighter) is a free online uitiliy which lets you convert your code/snippets in neatly formatted HTML. Supported languages are ASP.NET, XML,C, COBOL, Cold Fusion, C++, CSS, C#, Eiffel, Fortran, Haskell, Java, JavaScript, JScript, Mercury, MSIL, Pascal, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, SQL, Visual Basic, VB.Net and Visual Basic Script.

Hope you find this useful.