Question

I’m looking for an open source, cross platform (Windows & Linux at least) command line tool to take some code (C++, but multiple languages would be sweet), and spit out valid a XHTML representation of that code, with syntax highlighting included.

Ideally the XHTML should just wrap the code with <span> and <div> tags with different classes so I can supply the CSS code and change the colouration, but that’s an optional extra.

Does anyone know of such an application?

Answer 1

I can recommend Pygments. It’s easy to work with and supports a lot of languages. It does what you want, i.e., it wraps the code in <span> tags:

from pygments import highlight
from pygments.lexers import PythonLexer
from pygments.formatters import HtmlFormatter

code = 'print "Hello World"'
print highlight(code, PythonLexer(), HtmlFormatter())

gives

<div class="highlight">
<pre><span class="k">print</span> <span class="s">&quot;Hello World&quot;</span></pre>
</div>

and you can then use one of the supplied style sheets of make your own.

You can also call it via it’s pygmentize script. The script can format the output in different ways: HTML, LaTeX, ANSI color terminal output.