Formatting code snippets for blogging on Blogger

Question

My blog is hosted on Blogger and I frequently post code snippets in C / C# / Java / XML etc. but I find the snippet gets "mangled".

Are there any web sites that I could use to parse the snippet beforehand and sort out the formatting, convert XML "<" to "<" etc.

There are a numbers of questions around this area on SO but I couldn't find any that address this question directly.

Edit: For @Rich answer, site states "To display the formatted code on your site, you need to get this CSS stylesheet, and add a reference to it in the section of your page". That's the problem - you can't do this on Blogger AFAIK.

user_30317 · Answer

I've created a blog post entry which explains how to add code syntax highlighting to blogger using the syntaxhighlighter 2.0

Here's my blog post:

http://www.craftyfella.com/2010/01/syntax-highlighting-with-blogger-engine.html

I hope it helps you guys.. I'm quite impressed with what it can do.

Above Links stopped working. Try using http://hilite.me/

user_53501 · Answer

Here's one site that will format your code and spit out html, and it even includes inline styles for syntax coloring. Might not work for all of your needs, but is a good start. I believe he has made the source available if you want to extend it:

user_1527 · Answer

I use SyntaxHighlighter with my Blogger powered blog. The actual site is hosted on my own server rather than Blogger's though (Blogger has an option of ftping posts to your own site), but having your own domain and web hosting only costs a couple of dollars a month.

user_11621 · Answer

Actually I had used (what else ;-) ) Vim for this: it has a 2html "plugin". See the docs here.

So as I edit my code, I just convert it to HTML and paste the results to Blogger's HTML editor.

Note: it's not so beautiful HTML (embeded css would be better), but it just works.

Oh: and it has syntax files for several languages which makes it pretty useful.

Benjol_11410 · Answer

I rolled my own in F# (see this question), but it still isn't perfect (I just do regexps, so I don't recognise classes or method names etc.).

Basically, from what I can tell, the blogger editor will sometimes eat your angle brackets if you switch between Compose and HTML mode. So you have to paste into HTML mode then save directly. (I may be wrong on this, just tried now and it seems to work - browser dependent?)

It's horrible when you have generics!

Formatting code snippets for blogging on Blogger

16 Answers