Stack Overflow syntax highlighting [duplicate]

Question

This question already has an answer here:

What is syntax highlighting and how does it work? (1 answer)

Closed 11 years ago.

When using SO's code blocks, can you control how syntax highlighting is performed? Many times, I've pasted (for example) some shell output into an SO answer, and the syntax highlighting has been completely unrelated. Is there any way to turn it off, or to change the language used?

• Rowland Shaw: See also: meta.stackexchange.com/questions/981/syntax-highlighting-hints

Answer 1

There is a way to completely turn off code highlighting: use (削除) <code> (削除ここまで) tags (I often do this for OCaml/Lisp/Haskell code where unmatched 's cause problems). EDIT: As random pointed out, <pre> will work better than <code>.

Normal highlighting:

return 'a' "x" void

With <pre> it looks like this:

return 'a' "x" void

Keep in mind that with <pre>, you don't need to indent your code by four spaces. For example, the code in this answer is formatted like this:

Normal highlighting with four spaces:
 return 'a' "x" void
or with ```language:
```js
return 'a' "x" void
```
With `<pre>` it looks like this:
<pre>
return 'a' "x" void
</pre>

(Sorry about the highlighting but I can't do this in <pre>...)

• random: If you want the nice background, use PRE
• Phrogz: Note that it appears that <!-- language: none --> is now the preferred mechanism to disable syntax highlighting for a preformatted block of text.
• Cadoiz: I hope, my proposed edit enriches the post.
• This_is_NOT_a_forum: There is also the newer code fence, ```lang-none.

Answer 2

You cannot control how the syntax is highlighted.

SO, uses Google's prettify to do the syntax coloring. Prettify uses common language patterns to determine syntax coloring.

For example:

Comments:

// comment
#comment

Strings:

'This is a string'
"So is this"

Key words:

void
return
int 
bool

As Zifre says. You can turn off the syntax highlighting in code by using the <pre> tags around your desired block of code.

• SingleNegationElimination: So this is a problem upstream?
• SingleNegationElimination: Hmm... it looks like prettify has the ability to specify a language using a lang-* css class.
• Joe Casadonte: Didn't work for me.... <pre class="prettyprint lang-html"> made the code a complete mess.