highlight.php is a server side code highlighter written in PHP that currently supports over 135 languages. It's a port of highlight.js by Ivan Sagalaev that makes full use of the language and style definitions of the original JavaScript project.
Make sure that the classes defined in scrivo/Highlight can be found either by inclusion or by an autoloader. A trivial autoloader for this purpose is included in this project. Alternatively you can use some other autoloading functionality, for example the one provided by composer.
Second, the styles directory must be located somewhere in your document root. The page that contains your highlighted code will need to reference these CSS files.
The Highlight\Highlighter class contains the highlighting functionality. You can choose between two highlighting modes: explicit mode or automatic language detection mode.
Highlighting in explicit mode is rather straightforward, but please note the CSS class set on the PRE element:
<?php
// Initialize your autoloader (this example is using composer)
require 'vendor/autoload.php';
// Instantiate the Highlighter.
$hl = new Highlight\Highlighter();
// Highlight some code.
$r = $hl->highlight("ruby", file_get_contents("a_ruby_script.rb"));
// Output the code using the default stylesheet:
?>
<html>
<head>
<!-- Link to the stylesheets: -->
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="styles/default.css">
</head>
<body>
<!-- Print the highlighted code: -->
<pre class="hljs <?=$r->language?>"><?=$r->value?></pre>
</body>
</html>Alternatively you can use the autodetection mode. The thing to note here is that you'll need to supply a list of languages that you want to detect automatically. When using language autodetection the code to highlight is sampled using all given language definitions. This is rather inefficient when you use the whole set of 70+ languages so a method is provided for you to limit this set to just those languages that are relevant for your project.
<?php
// Initialize your autoloader (this example is using composer)
require 'vendor/autoload.php';
// Instantiate the Highlighter.
$hl = new Highlight\Highlighter();
// Set the languages you want to detect automatically.
$hl->setAutodetectLanguages(array("ruby", "python", "perl"));
// Highlight some code.
$r = $hl->highlightAuto(file_get_contents("a_ruby_script.rb"));
// Output the code using the default stylesheet:
?>
<html>
<head>
<!-- Link to the stylesheets: -->
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="styles/default.css">
</head>
<body>
<!-- Print the highlighted code: -->
<pre class="hljs <?=$r->language?>"><?=$r->value?></pre>
</body>
</html>Run composer require from your command line:
composer require stakx/highlight.phpThe project contains the following folders:
This folder contains the main source and the following files (classes):
This is the one that does the highlighting for you and the one you'll probably look for.
Auxiliary class used in the Highlight class. Instances of these classes represent the rather complex structures of regular expressions needed to scan through programming code in order to highlight them.
You don't need this class.
Auxiliary class to decode JSON files that contain path based references. The language definition data from highlight.js is to complex to describe in ordinary JSON files. Therefore it was chosen to use dojox.json.ref to export them. This class is able (to a very limited extend) to decode JSON data that was created with this dojo toolkit.
This class has a very distinct purpose and might be useful in other projects as well (and maybe a start of a new project ;) ).
A simple autoloader class that you possible might want or more likely not want to use. It is used for the tools and tests.
This folder contains all language definitions: one JSON file for each language. These files are not hand coded but extracted from the original highlight.js project.
These are the the CSS files needed to actually color the code. Not much to say about: these are just copied from the highlight.js project.
This folder contains two demo pages that can be accessed through your browser.
A test page showing all supported languages and styles.
Much like demo.php but this page focuses on the comparison between highlight.php and highlight.js. Both should yield the same results.
This folder contains the unit test for highlight.php. To run them run phpunit from this directory:
phpnunit .Note that the following tests for highlight.js are not rewritten for highlight.php:
Controlling language selection by setting an attribute to the containing DIV is irrelevant for highlight.php
In highlight.js code may contain additional HTML markup like in the following
PHP fragment: '$sum = $a + $b;'. Currently this is not supported by
highlight.php. highlight.php can only highlight (unescaped) code. Also
HTML breaks
code to highlight is not supported. highlight.php does
support tab replacement (defaults to 4 spaces).
There is no need to turn off highlighting through a class name on the code container.
highlight.php does not modify class names of code containers.
A collection of scripts that are used to extract data from the original highlight.js project.
The process of bringing in languages from highlight.js has been put into a single script. This script requires that you have cURL, PHP, and node.js installed on your machine. This is only necessary if you'd like to update languages or bring in new languages, it's not required for using this library in your application.
cd tools
bash process.shGeert Bergman
Sep 30, 2013
JavaScript code highlighting is very convenient and in many cases just what you want to use. Especially for programming blogs I would not advice you to use otherwise. But there are occasions where you're better off with a more 'static' approach, for instance if you want to send highlighted code in an email or for API documents. For this I needed a code highlighting program preferably written in PHP.
I couldn't found any satisfactory PHP solution so I decided to port one from JavaScript. After some comparison of different highlighting programs based on license, technology, language support highlight.js came out most favorable in my opinion.
It was my decision not to make a PHP highlighter but to do a port of highlight.js, these are different things. The goal was to make it work exactly as highlight.js to make as much use as possible of the language definitions and CSS files of the original program.
Happy coding!