PHP function which does syntax color parsing for multiple languages?

Question

I'm doing a PHP site which displays code examples in various languages (C#, PHP, Perl, Ruby, etc.). Are there any PHP functions which add syntax coloring for these and other languages?

If not, I would at least like to find that one built-in PHP function which does syntax coloring for PHP code, can't find it anymore. Thanks.

Answer 1

Why not do the syntax coloration in the client side?

Use prettify.js, its really versatile, Google Code and StackOverflow use it!

Check the test page for the supported languages.

Answer 2

You'd probably be better off formatting it in javascript actually. There are a few mature javascript syntax colors.

• highlight.js
• google highlighter
• prettify

Answer 3

For highlighting PHP use highlight_string(). (This may work OK with other languages as well.)

Edit: This function requires that the string start with the PHP opening tag. What I did on my site to get around this was I passed something like "<?php\n$code\n?>" to the highlight_string() function and then used regex to strip out the starting and ending tags that I had added in. This method has worked pretty well for highlighting C/C++, Scheme, and Java (and PHP that doesn't have the <?php ?> tags.)

Answer 4

As already mentioned Google prettify.js is really good, but if you want to do it on the server in PHP you could try looking at Pear Text Highlighter