StructuredTextExampleSyntaxHilight

It would be really useful if Zope would syntax-hilight to the best of its ability code that I include in my structured text documents.

There are plenty of syntax-hilighting programs out there, and there's probably alogrythms built into the open-source text editor that you're using. Here's an example of how this might work. Instead of this:

     def doc_xref(self, s,
        expr = re.compile('\[([%s0-9\-.:/;,\n\r\~]+)\]' % letters).search
        ):
        r = expr(s)
        if r:
            start, end = r.span(1)
            return (StructuredTextXref(s[start:end]), start-1, end+1)
        else:
            return None

You would, instead, see this:

     def doc_xref(self, s,
        expr = re.compile('\[([%s0-9\-.:/;,\n\r\~]+)\]' % letters).search
        ):
        r = expr(s)
        if r:
            start, end = r.span(1)
            return (StructuredTextXref(s[start:end]), start-1, end+1)
        else:
            return None

Pretty, no? This Syntax Hilight style comes directly from that used on cvs.zope.org by viewcvs.cgi 0.7.

Optimally, I'd like to add some sort of intelligence which would allow STX to determine what language it was hilighting automatically, possibly borrowing from the *nix file command as well as the alogrythms embedded in most modern syntax-hilighting open-source text editors. Barring that, perhaps we could come up with some sort of machine-readable (yet not markup-like) identifier. Maybe Language: Python on the first line of the example paragraph?

Comments very welcome :)

datagrok (Nov 2, 2001 10:24 am; Comment #1)

I think the proper way to implement this would be to use a bunch of <span> tags within the preformatted text, then use CSS to handle the colorization. That way, the user is able to build a CSS stylesheet that colors, bolds, applies formatting based on the type of element it's working on.

Here's a quick example. View source to check it out:

     def doc_xref(self, s,
        expr = re.compile('\[([%s0-9\-.:/;,\n\r\~]+)\]' % letters).search
        ):
        r = expr(s)
        if r:
            start, end = r.span(1) # How bout a comment?
            return (StructuredTextXref(s[start:end]), start-1, end+1) # And Another
        else:
            return None

Cool, eh? My favorite bit is the cool stuff that you can do with the comments, blocking them off to the right, away from the code, in a proportional font, with borders... sweet!