How to highlight Python console sessions in Jekyll
Adding a couple of options to the console lexer (console?lang=python&prompt=>>>) gets you syntax highlighting for a Python console session.
I was writing another article for this site, and I created a code block with backticks and the language identifier pycon, for a Python console session:
```pycon
>>> print("Hello world!")
Hello world!
```Apparently this doesn’t work with Rouge, the syntax highlighter used by Jekyll and this site – I got an unformatted <pre> block. (A fact which has taken me far too long to notice!)
That language identifier works with several other Markdown syntax highlighting libraries, but apparently not Rouge.
Rouge already knows how to do this!
I had a Google, and I found a six-year old issue on the Rouge repo asking for syntax highlighting for Python console sessions. And it has it! It’s just a bit non-obvious.
Rouge has a console lexer which I’ve used quite a few times, and that lexer can take options including lang and prompt. By passing these options to the language identifier, I was able to get Python console session with syntax highlighting:
```console?lang=python&prompt=>>>,...
>>> print("Hello world!")
Hello world!
```(It occurs to me that if Rouge ever adds support for the Fish shell, I might want to add lang=fish to my other uses of ```console.)
Enabling the pycon language identifier
That solution works, but it’s a bit ugly and I won’t remember to do it.
So I wrote a Jekyll hook that modifies my Markdown source to replace pycon with console?lang=… whenever my site gets built:
# _plugins/pycon_rouge_highlighter.rb
Jekyll::Hooks.register(%i[pages posts], :pre_render) do |p|
p.content = p.content.gsub("\n```pycon\n", "\n```console?lang=python&prompt=>>>,...\n")
end
This is quite a brittle fix, but for my small site it should be fine.
As a sidebar: if you want \n to be the newline character in Ruby, you need to wrap it in double quotes. 'a\nb' is a string with a backslash in the middle. "a\nb" is a string with a newline in the middle. I got this wrong when I first wrote this code, and I was quite confused because I’m used to quote marks being interchangeable in Python.