Formatting Ruby and HTML code for blog posting

Posting Ruby and HTML that looks good here on Blogspot can be a pain. But I found a ruby gem called Syntax that will format Ruby code to look right on web pages. It can also do the same thing for HTML/XML. I found out about this at http://blog.wolfman.com/articles/2006/05/26/howto-format-ruby-code-for-blogs. To install it, just type:

gem install syntax

at the command prompt. Then add this to your CSS declaration.

pre {
    background-color: #f1f1f3;
    color: #112;
    padding: 5px;
    font-family:"bitstream vera sans mono",monaco,"lucida console","courier new",courier,serif;
    font-size: 0.9em;
    overflow: auto;
    margin: 4px 0px;
    width: 95%;
}



/* Syntax highlighting */
pre .normal {}
pre .comment { color: #005; font-style: italic; }
pre .keyword { color: #A00; font-weight: bold; }
pre .method { color: #077; }
pre .class { color: #074; }
pre .module { color: #050; }
pre .punct { color: #447; font-weight: bold; }
pre .symbol { color: #099; }
pre .string { color: #944; background: #FFE; }
pre .char { color: #F07; }
pre .ident { color: #004; }
pre .constant { color: #07F; }
pre .regex { color: #B66; background: #FEF; }
pre .number { color: #F99; }
pre .attribute { color: #5bb; }
pre .global { color: #7FB; }
pre .expr { color: #227; }
pre .escape { color: #277; }

For blogspot, just click Template, and Edit HTML.

I wrote up a Ruby script using this gem for Windows that will read Ruby code from the clipboard, format it for HTML, and paste the HTML back to the clipboard. Here is the code:

require 'syntax/convertors/html'
require 'Win32API'
require 'win32/clipboard'
include Win32

in_data = Clipboard.data
convertor = Syntax::Convertors::HTML.for_syntax "ruby"
code_html = convertor.convert(in_data)
Clipboard.set_data(code_html)

And I also wrote one for formatting HTML or XML code. Notice that the only thing different is the for_syntax line.

require 'syntax/convertors/html'
require 'Win32API'
require 'win32/clipboard'
include Win32

in_data = Clipboard.data
convertor = Syntax::Convertors::HTML.for_syntax "xml"
code_html = convertor.convert(in_data)
Clipboard.set_data(code_html)

The only complaint is that sometimes line breaks are displayed on the web page in your code in Internet Explorer when there shouldn't be. The scroll bars show up, but it won't scroll over to the right for more than one word. This is more of an IE specific issue though, it displays fine in Firefox.