With the release of .Net 4.0 I have updated the FormatC syntax highlighter (used for all code samples on ookii.org) to support new keywords introduced in Visual Basic 10.0 and C# 4.0.

That's not the only update, however. FormatC 2.0 also has the ability to escape contextual keywords (previously, it would treat them as keywords regardless of the context), type name highlighting support for Visual Basic and improved XML literal support in Visual Basic.

PowerShell support is also improved; FormatC will try to use the parser included with PowerShell 2.0 to parse the code. Unfortunately, this web server does not have PowerShell 2.0 installed, so the online version of the highlighter will still use regular expressions to highlight PowerShell code.

If you have any feedback about FormatC, please leave it as a comment on this blog post.

Sample C# code highlighted using FormatC:

public static int SumAuthorPrices(IEnumerable<Book> books, string author)
{
    if( books == null )
        throw new ArgumentNullException("books");

    return (from b in books
            where b.Author == author
            select b.Price).Sum();
}

Sample Visual Basic code highlighted using FormatC:

Public Shared Function ConvertToXml(ByVal books As IEnumerable(Of Book)) As XDocument
    If books Is Nothing Then
        Throw New ArgumentNullException("books")
    End If

    Return <?xml version="1.0"?>
           <Books>
               <%= From b In Books
                   Select <Book Author=<%= b.Author %> Price=<%= b.Price %>>
                              <%= b.Title %>
                          </Book> %>
           </Books>
End Function

Sample XML code highlighted using FormatC:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<Books>
  <Book Author="Peter F. Hamilton" Price="18.99">
    The Evolutionary Void
  </Book>
</Books>

Sample T-SQL code highlighted using FormatC:

SELECT title, author, publisherName FROM Books b
  INNER JOIN Publisher p
  ON b.publisherId = p.id
WHERE b.price >= 10

Sample PowerShell code highlighted using FormatC (this used the parser-based method, not regular expressions):

foreach ($file in Get-ChildItem)
{
    if ($file.Length -gt 100kb) 
    {
        Write-Host -ForegroundColor Green $file
        Write-Host $file.Length
        Write-Host $file.LastAccessTime
    }
}

Categories: Software, Programming
Posted on: 2010-08-07 05:23 UTC.