I'm looking for a way to automatically format and color code I write in an HTML document. I know wikipedia does it, for example on the page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nested_function
I'm sure there are libraries out there to do this, but I can't for the life of me, find one. Does anyone have any suggestions?
Have a look at the Prettify JavaScript library. It's the one generally used by people (it's the one being used here on SO, for example.)
You would use it like this:
In your <head> element:
<link href="prettify.css" type="text/css" rel="stylesheet" />
<script type="text/javascript" src="prettify.js"></script>
In your <body> element:
<body onload="prettyPrint()">
<!-- any HTML you like here... -->
<pre class="prettyprint">
def say_hi():
print("Hello World!")
</pre>
<!-- any HTML you like here... -->
</body>
That's for simple use of the library. If you're using other JavaScript on your page I would recommend other methods for enabling the Prettify library (i.e., don't use the onload attribute of the <body> element.) For example, if you're using jQuery, I wrote this jQuery plugin that I usually use to syntax highlight certain elements:
// Extend jQuery functionality to support prettify as a prettify() method.
jQuery.fn.prettify = function () { this.html(prettyPrintOne(this.html())); };
Used like this:
$('#my-code-element').prettify();
This is an old question, but as it came up first in Google for me, I thought I'd add another option. While Prettify is still a serviceable option, it's showing its age a bit. A newer library I ran across is Prism, and it seems to work rather well. It's more semantic and gives finer-grained control over how to format your code. It also supports plugins and its themes look nicer out of the box than Prettify's.
I think a simpler and powerful solution are highlight.js. It support 169 languages at this time and 77 code styles (like Solarized dark and light). Some more:
Quick setup:
1 - In HTML head:
<link rel="stylesheet" href="//cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/highlight.js/9.9.0/styles/default.min.css">
<script src="//cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/highlight.js/9.9.0/highlight.min.js"></script>
<script>hljs.initHighlightingOnLoad();</script>
2 - In your HTML content
<pre>
<code class="html">
<p>This is your HMTL sample</p>
<p>You can use classes like "html", "php", "css", "javascript" too..</p>
</code>
</pre>
You can check the languages and styles here.
