Question

I’m having some fun with, copy/pasting code into textarea and then trying to make it look decent in a “pre” “/pre”… And of course I’ve looked at SO.

But I’m having some troubles with to much whitespace, so I’m trying to replace \t with some nbsp; but it’s not getting.. like really pretty.

So I was wondering, how would be a nice way of doing this? How is SO doing it? Is it even able to do it in a decent way?

What I got right now is:

var content = $this.html()
                        .replace(/\t\t\t\t\t\t/g, "       ")
                        .replace(/\t\t\t\t\t/g, "      ")
                        .replace(/\t\t\t\t/g, "         ")
                        .replace(/\t\t\t/g, "      ")
                        .replace(/\t\t/g, "   ")
                        .replace(/\t/g, "");
        $this.html(content);

Answer 1

I think you should use a jQuery syntax highlighter and let the plugin do the work for you.

http://alexgorbatchev.com/SyntaxHighlighter/

http://steamdev.com/snippet/