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Until recently, I posted Python code (whitespace matters) to blogspot.com using something like this:

<div style="overflow-x: scroll "> 
<table bgcolor="#ffffb0" border="0" width="100%" padding="4"> 
<tbody><tr><td><pre style=" hidden;font-family:monaco;"> 
my code here 
</pre></table></div>

About a week ago, the posts started acquiring additional newlines so all of this is double-spaced. Using a simple <pre> tag is no good (besides losing the color) b/c it also results in double newlines, while a <code> tag messes with the whitespace. I guess I could just add &nbsp;*4---but that's frowned upon or something by the HTML style gods.

The standard answer to this (like right here on SO) is to get syntax coloring or highlighting through the use of css (which I don't know much about), for example as discussed in a previous SO question here. The problem I have with that is that all such solutions require loading of a resource from a server on the web. But if (say 5 years from now) that resource is gone, the html version of the code will not render at all. If I knew Javascript I guess I could probably fix that.

The coloring problem itself is trivial, it could be solved through use of <style> tags with various definitions. But parsing is hard; at least I've not made much progress trying to parse Python myself. Multi-line strings are a particular pain. I could just ignore the hard cases and code the simple ones.

TextMate has a command Create HTML from Document. The result is fairly wordy but could just be pasted into a post. But say if you had 3 code segments, then it's like 1000 lines or something. And of course it's a document, so you have to actually cut before you paste.

Is there a simple Python parser? A better solution?

UPDATE: I wrote my own parser for syntax highlighting. Still a little buggy perhaps, but it is quite simple and a self-contained solution. I posted it here. Pygments is also a good choice as well.

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telliott99
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2 Answers2

5

Why don't you use pygments?

Gabi Purcaru
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  • This looks like just the thing. Unfortunately, it doesn't work (at least out of the box), from the command line: `pygmentize -f html /path/to/file.py` – telliott99 Aug 20 '11 at 21:46
  • Looks like this should do the parsing etc. exactly as the question specifies. I just have to figure out how to use it. Thanks. – telliott99 Aug 20 '11 at 22:09
  • @telliott99 I just tried the exact command you pasted, and it worked for me. Maybe you have a broken installation of pygments. – Gabi Purcaru Aug 20 '11 at 22:10
  • It's working. I just didn't understand what was needed: `pygmentize -f html -O full -o test.html test.py` gives the whole html document. – telliott99 Aug 20 '11 at 23:18
  • Arggh. Looks good as an html document but blogger is still added double newlines. – telliott99 Aug 20 '11 at 23:23
3

What worked for me was to use prettify. At the top of the HTML, add the line

<script src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/gh/google/code-prettify@master/loader/run_prettify.js"></script>

to auto-run prettify. Then use

<code class="prettify">
... enter your code here ...
</code>

in your HTML.

I actually used this code on blogspot.com; here is an example.

Mingwei Samuel
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Kurt Peek
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