custom vb BB codes

[trican]

Hi,

I'd like to setup BB code for a programming language in a similar fashion to the way its done for php (e.g.

PHP Code:

code 


. Could anyone point me in the right direction!

Also I've seen some sites which do syntax highlighting of code is this hard?

thanks

[trican]

no -one?

[CarCdr]

You would have to find a PHP script that does the syntax highlighting for the language in question. That's the hard part. Once you have that, hanging it off of a bbcode is the simple part.

[trican]

would that not be fairly straight forward, just send the post to function, which parses it looking for keywords, and then replacing the keyword with A BBCODE for different colours?

You think it would be easy to "hang it off" vb?

[CarCdr]

Originally Posted by trican

would that not be fairly straight forward, just send the post to function, which parses it looking for keywords, and then replacing the keyword with A BBCODE for different colours?

You think it would be easy to "hang it off" vb?

Writing a language parser is non-trivial. I have written a couple from scratch and, more frequently, used lexical/parser tools to define a language parser to do the job.

It is not as simple as looking for keywords. If you did that, you would incorrectly highlight keywords within strings, as in:

$variable = "foreach $string } ?> ";

You must be able to break the input into a syntactically correct stream of tokens, then parse the tokens into a semantically correct series of language constructs, such as statements and expressions.

[trican]

Originally Posted by CarCdr

Writing a language parser is non-trivial. I have written a couple from scratch and, more frequently, used lexical/parser tools to define a language parser to do the job.

It is not as simple as looking for keywords. If you did that, you would incorrectly highlight keywords within strings, as in:

And checking if there was a space bewfre and after wont be enough?

]
You must be able to break the input into a syntactically correct stream of tokens, then parse the tokens into a semantically correct series of language constructs, such as statements and expressions.

I'm not really too sure I understand what you mean by stream of token, etc



Ultimately i dont see why it wouldn't be as easy as copying the current VB php pharser and modifying the keyword, so as to suit the chosen language?

If i were to pay for a hack like this, how much would it cost do you think?

[CarCdr]

There is nothing you can copy and modify. There is no "VB php parser". It uses the highlight_string function that comes as part of PHP.

This is not as easy as you think. Any simple methods are doomed to produce silly results.