Client-Side code highlighting

When I visited Alex Gorbatchev's blog, I noticed he had a unique client-side code highlighting solution in place, one I hadn't seen anywhere else. That's something I've wanted on my blog for a while; the vanilla <PRE> sections I've been using are servicable, but primitive. Although I loves me some regex, I don't know squat about PERL so I've been hesitant to hack anything fancier into my Movable Type install.

After I asked Alex about his solution, he was nice enough to package up his JavaScript syntax highlighter as dp.SyntaxHighlighter. It's really quite slick, and it works with all kinds of code: C#, VB.NET, JavaScript, PHP, SQL, and XML. Here's a VB.NET sample:

    Public Function GetGoogleWordFrequency(ByVal strWord As String) As Integer
        Dim strUrl As String = "http://www.google.com/search?num=1&q=" & _
          Web.HttpUtility.UrlEncode(strWord)
        Dim wc As New WebClientGzip
        Dim strPageContents As String = wc.DownloadDataGzip(strUrl)
        Dim m As Match
        m = Regex.Match(strPageContents, _
          "results.*?\d+.*?\d+.*?of about.*?(?<TotalResults>[\d,]+)", _
          RegexOptions.IgnoreCase)
        If Not m Is Nothing Then
            Dim strResults As String = m.Groups("TotalResults").ToString
            If strResults.Length > 0 Then
                Return Convert.ToInt32(strResults.Replace(",", ""))
            End If
        End If
        Return -1
    End Function

Alex tested this JavaScript on FireFox and IE6, and is looking for compatibility feedback on other browsers.

Posted by Jeff Atwood    View blog reactions

 

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