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Blake Martin
33 posts
Bad code highlighting
Edited by Blake Martin on Reason: Initial post
I'm 90% this is old news, but why are code blocks still highlighted incorrectly? I mean, no highlighting would be better than this: https://4coder.handmade.network/b...n_of_4coders_new_lister_api#15817
Ben Visness
109 posts / 9 projects
HMN lead.
Bad code highlighting
The highlighting in code blocks is done by a Python library called Pygments. If no language is specified in the code tag, Pygments tries to guess which language it is. Sometimes it guesses incorrectly, which is what's happening in that post.

You can always just specify the language by name like so:

1
[code language=c]


You can specify any language from Pygments' list.

The auto-guessing behavior is what the site has had since the beginning, so we kept it when we rolled out the new BBCode parser about four months ago. I know sites like Github don't auto-guess languages in their code blocks, so maybe someday we could turn that feature off.
Blake Martin
33 posts
Bad code highlighting
Edited by Blake Martin on
Oh, okay. Thanks! Maybe there could be some sort of tooltip or something similar that could hint at that when people use the code tag?
511 posts
Bad code highlighting
or default by adding the language tag. It's a bit more in your face that way.
Ben Visness
109 posts / 9 projects
HMN lead.
Bad code highlighting
Yeah, adding the language by default seems reasonable. I'll add it to our list and see what the other staff think.
Blake Martin
33 posts
Bad code highlighting
That's a better idea.