When using SO's code blocks, can you control how syntax highlighting is performed? Many times, I've pasted (for example) some shell output into an SO answer, and the syntax highlighting has been completely unrelated. Is there any way to turn it off, or to change the language used?
2 Answers
There is a way to completely turn off code highlighting: use tags (I often do this for OCaml/Lisp/Haskell code where unmatched <code>
'
s cause problems). EDIT: As random pointed out, <pre>
will work better than <code>
.
Normal highlighting:
return 'a' "x" void
With <pre>
it looks like this:
return 'a' "x" void
Keep in mind that with <pre>
, you don't need to indent your code by four spaces. For example, the code in this answer is formatted like this:
Normal highlighting with four spaces:
return 'a' "x" void
or with ```language:
```js
return 'a' "x" void
```
With `<pre>` it looks like this:
<pre>
return 'a' "x" void
</pre>
(Sorry about the highlighting but I can't do this in <pre>
...)
-
-
9Note that it appears that
<!-- language: none -->
is now the preferred mechanism to disable syntax highlighting for a preformatted block of text.– PhrogzCommented Mar 31, 2011 at 22:32 -
-
1
You cannot control how the syntax is highlighted.
SO, uses Google's prettify to do the syntax coloring. Prettify uses common language patterns to determine syntax coloring.
For example:
Comments:
// comment
#comment
Strings:
'This is a string'
"So is this"
Key words:
void
return
int
bool
As Zifre says. You can turn off the syntax highlighting in code by using the <pre>
tags around your desired block of code.
-
1
-
Hmm... it looks like prettify has the ability to specify a language using a lang-* css class. Commented Sep 10, 2009 at 23:26
-
Didn't work for me....
<pre class="prettyprint lang-html">
made the code a complete mess. Commented Mar 6, 2010 at 13:51