Syntax highlighting on blogs

Syntax highlighting is always been a desired things on blogs, specially for those who post their code so often on blogs. Not only it adds to the look of the blog but also, it makes the code more readable.  From quite a few days, i was trying to search for something by which i can paste my codes in formatted highlighted form on the blog, but whatever plug-in i found was not integrateable into wordpress free service.

The earlier solutions that came to my mind was taking a snapshot of the code window and post here. But it includes few extra steps for me (taking a snapshopt, croping it and the uploading it) and for reader, they just can’t COPY-PASTE the code if they want to.

So if you are one of those who are looking for some syntax highlighting thing for your blog, here is some great tool, named Highlight. The tools come with some default styles, including eclipse, emacs and other well know editors. You can configure the style if you wish so and the you can export it in your desired format i.e (html – with inline CSS, RTF, XHTML, LaTeX, SVG, XML etc).  See the below snippet that I formatted/highlighted using the it. it’s pretty clean and easy to incorporate 🙂

1 package com.e2e.test;
2 
3 import javax.microedition.lcdui.Alert;
4 import javax.microedition.lcdui.Command;
5 import javax.microedition.lcdui.CommandListener;
6 import javax.microedition.lcdui.Display;
7 import javax.microedition.lcdui.Displayable;
8 import javax.microedition.lcdui.Form;
9 import javax.microedition.lcdui.StringItem;
10 import javax.microedition.lcdui.TextBox;
11 import javax.microedition.midlet.MIDlet;
12 import javax.microedition.midlet.MIDletStateChangeException;
13 
14 public class Test extends MIDlet implements CommandListener, Runnable{
15 
16     private Display mDisplay;
17     private Command mExitCommand, mFindCommand, mCancelCommand;
18 
19     private TextBox mSubmitBox;
20     private Form mProgressForm;
21     private StringItem mProgressString;
22 
23     public Test() {
24         mExitCommand = new Command("Exit", Command.EXIT, 0);
25         mFindCommand = new Command ("Find", Command.SCREEN, 0);
26         mCancelCommand = new Command ("Cancel", Command.CANCEL, 0);
27 
28         mSubmitBox = new TextBox("Test", "", 32, 0);
29         mSubmitBox.addCommand(mExitCommand);
30         mSubmitBox.addCommand(mFindCommand);
31         mSubmitBox.setCommandListener(this);
32 
33         mProgressForm = new Form ("Lookup Progress");
34         mProgressString = new StringItem(null, null);
35         mProgressForm.append(mProgressString);
36     }
37 
38     protected void destroyApp(boolean arg0) throws
39                               MIDletStateChangeException {
40         // TODO Auto-generated method stub
41 
42     }
43 
44     protected void pauseApp() {
45         // TODO Auto-generated method stub
46 
47     }
48 
49     protected void startApp() throws MIDletStateChangeException {
50         mDisplay = Display.getDisplay(this);
51         mDisplay.setCurrent(mSubmitBox);
52     }
53 
54     public void commandAction(Command c, Displayable d) {
55         if (c == mExitCommand){
56             try {
57                 destroyApp(false);
58             } catch (MIDletStateChangeException e) {
59                 System.out.println("exception @ destroyApp(false);");
60             }
61             notifyDestroyed();
62         }
63         else if (c == mFindCommand){
64             mDisplay.setCurrent(mProgressForm);
65             Thread t = new Thread(this);
66             t.start();
67         }
68     }
69 
70     public void run() {
71         String word = mSubmitBox.getString();
72         String definition;
73         try{
74             definition = lookup(word);
75         }
76         catch (Exception ie){
77             Alert report = new Alert("Sorry", "Something went wrong", null,
78                            null);
79             report.setTimeout(Alert.FOREVER);
80             mDisplay.setCurrent(report, mSubmitBox);
81             return;
82         }
83         Alert report = new Alert ("Definition", definition, null, null);
84         report.setTimeout(Alert.FOREVER);
85         mDisplay.setCurrent(report, mSubmitBox);
86 
87     }
88 
89     private String lookup(String word) {
90         if (word.equalsIgnoreCase("1")){
91             throw new RuntimeException("exception thrown");
92         }
93         return "hardcoded definition";
94     }
95 
96 }