I finally got around to adding syntax highlighting to the site today, a feature I’ve been meaning to add for several months now. I decided to use the Google code prettify script, via a handy-dandy Wordpress plugin.¹

To make it easier to post prettified things, I also hacked the Markdown plugin so it automatically adds a prettyprint class to indented pre/code and backtick² blocks:

function _doCodeBlocks_callback($matches) {
    $codeblock = $matches[1];

    $codeblock = $this->encodeCode($this->outdent($codeblock));
    $codeblock = $this->detab($codeblock);
    # trim leading newlines and trailing whitespace
    $codeblock = preg_replace(array('/\A\n+/', '/\n+\z/'), '', $codeblock);

    $result = "\n\n".$this->hashBlock("<pre><code class='prettyprint'>" 
            . $codeblock . "\n</code></pre>")."\n\n";

    return $result;
}

While I was at it, I fixed an old bug in my SimpleLink plugin too, as it was munging array syntax like $a[9] in pre blocks. Some day I’ll rewrite the plugin as a full parser, merging it with Markdown (and RestructuredText).³ But not today.

1. While I don’t strictly need the plugin (adding it to the template header would be enough), it may be a handy way to hook it into my RSS feed in the future ↩
2. The backtick hack is similar to the indented pre/code here ↩
3. Markdown has a similar set of parsing bugs, as it hacks parsing the posts too ↩