syntax highlighter

Update #1: hmmmm, stupid but I write these post sometimes weeks ahead…. and this one caught up on me… The new version of SyntaxHighlighter Evolved has ActionScript support.. 🙂

Update #2: I could remove everything below, but I’m keeping this here, perhaps someone can use it…. and it took some time to write, so I really can’t kill my darlings.

A little change I made to the new updated plugin:
find the plugin-folder “syntaxhighlighter” and add the next line to “syntaxhighlighter.php”
[as highlight=”1,3″]
‘as’ => ‘as3’,
‘as3’ => ‘as3’,
‘actionscript’ => ‘as3’,
‘actionscript3’ => ‘as3’,
[/as]
and find in the plugin-folder “syntaxhighlighter”, the folder “scripts” and change the next line to “shBrushAS3.js”
[as wrapper=”true”]
// SyntaxHighlighter.brushes.AS3.aliases = [‘actionscript3’, ‘as3’]; // old line and the bottom of the .js file
SyntaxHighlighter.brushes.AS3.aliases = [‘actionscript3′,’actionscript’, ‘as3’, ‘as’]; // new line
[/as]

the new syntaxhighlighter only uses “as3” and “actionscript3“, and I just changed all my post to “as”

Update #3: and update the css, that made the code not wrap….
I removed “white-space: pre;” form “code” and now it wraps:

code  { font-family: "Courier New", Courier, monospace; font-size: 1.2em; /*white-space: pre;*/ color: Gray; }

Today I updated my SyntaxHighlighter JavaScript package by Alex Gorbatchev and it was not easy…

I have a syntax highlighter installed on my blog to show my ActionScript source code in a nice way.
But the first time I installed it, I choose a WordPress plugin which isn’t add to WordPress Plugin Directoryand doesn’t appear to be update.
And if I remember correctly, it didn’t work as it should and I had to add ActionScript. Read my previous decision here.
So I had to upgrade to SyntaxHighlighter Evolved which of course came with some upgrading issues created by my previous install.

First problem: write ActionScript.
ActionScript is not default included in the Syntaxhighter, and you will be advised to use [ javascript ] tag, which is a good advice since AS is almost javascript. It would make your live easier if you choose this option.
But as in my last installment of syntaxhighlighter I want to use Actionscript highlighting.
So there we go:
To do that you need an Actionscript brush. I found two of them: cptloadtest.com has one but it looks like its more for AS2,
and yourpalmark.com which is also the one I choose, because I used his version also with my previous installment and it’s for AS3.

This is what you need to do: install SyntaxHighlighter and if you choose to use [ javascript ]
your done. I was not done yet, so lets continue… Download the shBrushAS3.zip, extract and place the shBrushAS3.js in the correct folder on the server (in my case .../wp-content/plugins/syntaxhighlighter/syntaxhighlighter/scripts). Now you need to change some code in the WordPress plugin:
You can do this in WordPress itself if you have writing permission set, or you can edit the php file on your desktop…
you need to add the highlighted code

// Register brush scripts
wp_register_script( 'syntaxhighlighter-core', plugins_url('syntaxhighlighter/syntaxhighlighter/scripts/shCore.js'), array(), $this->agshver );
wp_register_script( 'syntaxhighlighter-brush-actionscript3', plugins_url('syntaxhighlighter/syntaxhighlighter/scripts/shBrushAS3.js'), array('syntaxhighlighter-core'), $this->agshver);

and

// Create list of brush aliases and map them to their real brushes
$this->brushes = apply_filters( 'syntaxhighlighter_brushes', array(
	'as'       => 'actionscript3',
	'as2'       => 'actionscript3',
	'as3'       => 'actionscript3',
	'actionscript'       => 'actionscript3',
	'bash'       => 'bash',

and now you are ready to go.

I had to change some other stuff ([ source:as ]...[ /source ] into [ as ]...[ /as ] ) and it seems that my css is not playing nice with syntaxhighlighter. hmmmm this is more work then I thought it would be.

I had to deactivate one plugin: autoescape , it didn’t play nice with SyntaxHightlighter. I didn’t use it anymore, and the combination generated gibberish.

ActionScript syntax highlighting

I wanted an easy way to present my ActionScript code on my blog.

The easiest way is to use the code button in WordPress and CSS.
I’ve used this in combination with the pre tag
But that’s doesn’t show nice code highlighting or line numbers…

Syntax highlighting is a feature of some text editors that displays text “especially source code” in different colors and fonts according to the category of terms.

I found out that there are two (probably more, but these two are the ones I tested) methods:
code highlighting server sided (PHP) or client sided (javascript)

Server sided

The first WordPress highlight plugin is: iG:Syntax Hiliter which is based upon GeSHi.

GeSHi – Generic Syntax Highlighter for PHP. Used to highlight almost any code for the web. Nearly 100 supported languages: PHP, HTML, C and more. Styles can be changed on the fly and CSS classes can be used to reduce the amount of XHTML compliant output.

Because the code highlighting is done on the server it’s really quick.
The install was very easy and it’s very easy to use: [as] place your code here [/as] (this is the code you use for ActionScript, read the manual included in the zip for other languages)

Pro: serversided so the code highlighting is done almost at once, a lot of programming languages that can be highlighted, easy to use in WordPress
Con: extra pressure on the server?, no copy to clipboard, not sure how up-to-date the plugin is (it works very good, but the last post about the plugin is from 2006, although the writer of the plugin replies to recent comments), I’m not very fond of the default CSS (but that can be modified). no button in the WordPress wysiwyg/html editor

Client sided

The second plugin is: ~~syntaxhighlighter written by Erik Range~~, this plugin is based upon dp.SyntaxHighlighter from Alex Gorbatchev.

The plugin that I installed is removed, but there is a new one:http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/syntaxhighlighter/. This one is in the WordPress plugin directory, so it’s easy to install. I haven’t tested this one

syntaxhighlighter

SyntaxHighlighter is here to help a developer/coder to post code snippets online with ease and have it look pretty. It’s 100% Java Script based and it doesn’t care what you have on your server.

Because the code highlighting is done client sided, you will see some ‘flickering’, and change of appearances of the code block.
Default the dp.SyntaxHighlighter doesn’t include ActionScript so I had to add that to it (digitalflipbook wrote the javascript file so I only had to add it), change the WordPress plugin (it didn’t have ActionScript either ), update the WordPress Plugin to version 1.5.1 of dp.SyntaxHighlighter and fix the copy to clipboard function….

Pro: no extra pressure on the server, copy to clipboard, it looks nicer, posible to add just one language instead of all,
Con: no default ActionScript, view code in popup, no button in the WordPress wysiwyg/html editor

My choice

Both have there strong points and there weaknesses, but I choose iG:Syntax Hiliter because of it has included ActionScript default, and the processing of the code highlighting is done on the server side.

Update #1: For some reason iG:Syntax Hiliter changes the < code>-tag to a highlighted code block with the programming language code (never heard of that programming language 😉 ) but more strangely: to something unreadable… I always test all the plugins I want to use on a WordPress blog installed on a usb-webserver and the plugin works fine there, probably the plugins I have installed on my ‘live’ blog don’t play nice with each other. I don’t have the time to find out who they are, so I used syntaxhighlighter.
There is no reason you shouldn’t use iG:Syntax Hiliter: it works fine with WordPress 2.5, it just doesn’t on my blog. 🙁

[as]
function test ():void {
trace (‘test’);
}
[/as]