Formatting code snippets for blogging on Blogger

Question

My blog is hosted on Blogger and I frequently post code snippets in C / C# / Java / XML etc. but I find the snippet gets "mangled".

Are there any web sites that I could use to parse the snippet beforehand and sort out the formatting, convert XML "<" to "<" etc.

There are a numbers of questions around this area on SO but I couldn't find any that address this question directly.

Edit: For @Rich answer, site states "To display the formatted code on your site, you need to get this CSS stylesheet, and add a reference to it in the section of your page". That's the problem - you can't do this on Blogger AFAIK.

Answer 1

Here's a link to one site that will format your code and spit out html, and it even includes inline styles for syntax coloring. Might not work for all of your needs, but is a good start. I believe he has made the source available if you want to extend it:

http://www.manoli.net/csharpformat/

Answer 2

Actually I had used (what else ;-) ) Vim for this: it has a 2html "plugin". See the docs here.

So as I edit my code, I just convert it to HTML and paste the results to Blogger's HTML editor.

Note: it's not so beautiful HTML (embeded css would be better), but it just works.

Oh: and it has syntax files for several languages which makes it pretty useful.

Answer 3

I use SyntaxHighlighter with my Blogger powered blog. The actual site is hosted on my own server rather than Blogger's though (Blogger has an option of ftping posts to your own site), but having your own domain and web hosting only costs a couple of dollars a month.

Answer 4

I rolled my own in F# (see this question), but it still isn't perfect (I just do regexps, so I don't recognise classes or method names etc.).

Basically, from what I can tell, the blogger editor will sometimes eat your angle brackets if you switch between Compose and HTML mode. So you have to paste into HTML mode then save directly. (I may be wrong on this, just tried now and it seems to work - browser dependent?)

It's horrible when you have generics!

Answer 5

Syntax highlighter is rather a tough job and need to get everything in place

You may even check the following link, may be this should help

http://www.blogpandit.com/2009/05/add-code-snippet-to-blogger-mystery.html

Answer 6

It looks like there have been some changes with SyntaxHighlighter 2.0 that make it easier to use with Blogger.

There are hosted versions of the styles and Javascripts at: http://alexgorbatchev.com/pub/sh/

Answer 7

Hi,

I've created a blog post entry which explains how to add code syntax highlighting to blogger using the syntaxhighlighter 2.0

Here's my blog post:

http://www.craftyfella.com/2010/01/syntax-highlighting-with-blogger-engine.html

I hope it helps you guys.. I'm quite impressed with what it can do.

Answer 8

This can be done fairly easily with SyntaxHighlighter. I have step-by-step instructions for setting up SyntaxHighlighter in Blogger on my blog. SyntaxHighlighter is very easy to use. It lets you post snippets in raw form and then wrap them in pre blocks like:

<pre name="code" class="brush: erlang"><![CDATA[
-module(trim).

-export([string_strip_right/1, reverse_tl_reverse/1, bench/0]).

bench() -> [nbench(N) || N <- [1,1000,1000000]].

nbench(N) -> {N, bench(["a" || _ <- lists:seq(1,N)])}.

bench(String) ->
    {{string_strip_right,
    lists:sum([
        element(1, timer:tc(trim, string_strip_right, [String]))
        || _ <- lists:seq(1,1000)])},
    {reverse_tl_reverse,
    lists:sum([
        element(1, timer:tc(trim, reverse_tl_reverse, [String]))
        || _ <- lists:seq(1,1000)])}}.

string_strip_right(String) -> string:strip(String, right, $\n).

reverse_tl_reverse(String) ->
    lists:reverse(tl(lists:reverse(String))).
]]></pre>

Just change the brush name to "python" or "java" or "javascript" and paste in the code of your choice. The CDATA tagging let's you put pretty much any code in there without worrying about entity escaping or other typical annoyances of code blogging.