Syntax Highlighting and Redcloth

I’ve been blogging a lot lately. I dunno what’s gotten into me. I just have a lot to say, I guess.

When I’m blogging, I tend to like using code snippets. Unfortunately, at the moment I lack any sort of syntax highlighting for these snippets. That kinda sucks.

Now, I use Textile, and thus RedCloth, for my post formatting. This works out reasonably well, except that it doesn’t have any support for syntax highlighting.

So that leads me to wonder. Does anyone know of a pre-existing way to integrate syntax highlighting with RedCloth? ‘Cause I could really use that about now.

Unfortunately, preliminary Googlings have suggested that no, there is no such serendipity. As such, I’ve been thinking a little about what such an integration would look like. At the moment, declaring a monospace code segment looks like this:

Blah blah blah
This is normal text
No one really cares

  Oh wow this is code
  How cool is that
  Woo hoo

Aw man back to text
Poo

All the information it really needs for syntax highlighting is which syntax it’s in. The easiest thing to do would be assume Ruby and hope it doesn’t screw up everything else too much, but that’s kind of pathetic. We can do better.

What if we just added a simple declaration? We could just somehow say: “this next block of code is Ruby.” Let’s use ”$”, ‘cause it’s like an “S” for “Syntax” and it’s not already being used.

Text text text

$ruby
  code code code

Text text text

Actually, really, there’s no need to force that declaration to be right before the code. Most of the time I’m going to use the same syntax for the whole file, so I might as well just declare it at the top. Or before the first code. Whatever.

Techinically, it shouldn’t be that difficult. Just lock up RedCloth’s Smithsonian, and use Syntax or CodeRay to do the parsing.

So, if anyone knows of a pre-existing solution for this issue, let me know. Otherwise, I’ll take it into my own hands. And I’ll be sure to post the result here.