Improve The Code Tag Highlighting [duplicate]

Question

Possible Duplicate:
VB.NET Syntax Highligting does not properly support comment.

When you try to put a code you put it into a code tag, but some programming languages have problems with this, like when you put a ', that represents a comment in Visual Basic language the code that put all the the other code highlighted as a comment and ends when you put one more ' like you can see here:

'Here is a String declaration
Dim test As String
'Here ends a String declaration

Please put something that you have to specify what is the programming language that is in the code tag, to improve the visual element. Thanks.

Answer 1

One thing Stack Overflow could do is have a mechanism to easily suggest what language you're using in the code, for instance:

#!python

def foo():
    return 10 // 7

print(foo())

#!html
<a href="http://www.python.org/">Python!</a>

This is the approach taken by Trac, and it works quite well.

Answer 2

I agree, the code highlighting seems very good for C#, but for VB and others it is quite poor, if not unhelpful. I would love to see this improved.

Answer 3

Hello, If it's in Google Code the project of the code highlighting, here is the code highlighting project that i use in my site and it support's the language selection feature, but remember that is a project written in JavaScript. SyntaxHighlighter

Answer 4

I would like to point out that it almost never highlights Perl code correctly.

These all do the same thing, but aren't highlighted the same:

die if //;  # Perl doesn't even have // for comments
die if m''; # the only one, that is even close, to being right
die if m();
die if m::;

Now I know that part of the problem is that Perl is a very difficult to parse language.

That's why I think we should be able to highlight the code manually.

<pre class="prettyprint"><code>
...
<span class="kwd">die</span>
<span class="pln"> </span>
<span class="kwd">if</span>
<span class="pln"> m</span><span class="str">''</span><span class="pun">;</span>
...
</code></pre>

<pre class="prettyprint-correct-perl"><code>
...
<span class="kwd">die</span>
<span class="pln"> </span>
<span class="kwd">if</span>
<!--                      /--higlight m'' together---\   -->
<span class="pln"> </span><span class="str">m''</span><span class="pun">;</span>
...
</code></pre>

Even editors that are designed for highlighting Perl code, can sometimes get it wrong.

Answer 5

See my answer to the related question here:
VB.NET/VBScript syntax highlighting does not properly support comments

In summary, you can do this as workaround for now:

''# You're commenting!
Dim c As New Comment()

Answer 6

This has pretty much been asked before in other posts where people are requesting more language-specific highlighting features (and the ability to select what language you want).

It can definitely be frustrating when doing VB and trying to put comments, so I end up usually marking up my code with c# comments, even though that won't be very good for anyone doing a full copy/paste job on my content.