Python Toolbox 2 : Pygments

This is the second post in my series about Python tools and I'm going to talk about Pygments. Pygments is a generic syntax highlighter implemented in Python. I started using it to able to show the code samples on this blog in a decent way.

Pygments can highlight a very large list of programming languages, template languages and other sources like config files, shell scripts, css and many more. The markup of your sources can then be exported to multiple output formats like HTML, GIF or BMP image, Latex, rtf, svg, Bulletin bord code and terminal. More info about the formatters can be found here.

Once installed you can call this library from within Python or you can call the provided executable from the commandline. The documentation for Pygmentize is very clear and extensive so I won't reproduce it here but I'll show you some small samples.

Below is a sample commandline usage. The first command outputs a file with your code wrapped in a div and span elements with css class attributes. The second command creates the stylesheet for your code.

pygmentize -o test.html test.py pygmentize -S default -f html > style.css

If you want to create a full html file from your code with the styles included then all you need is the following command :

pygmentize -O full=true -o test.html test.py

For the code in my blog I use the following simple Python script that converts the scripts in a folder to a html files. I also added the styles to the css of my blog.
First I import the relevant namespaces from pygments and the os namespace. And then create a basic HtmlFormatter

from pygments import highlight
from pygments.lexers import PythonLexer
from pygments.formatters import HtmlFormatter
import os

formatter = HtmlFormatter()

If you want a printout of all the different classes the only thing you need is the following line. I ran this once and copied to my style definitions on my blog.

print formatter.get_style_defs('.highlight')

The following code converts all the python files in a directory to html files with the same name. We loop over the elements in the folder, read the python files, create a highlight of them and then write this to a new file.

indir= r''
for x in os.listdir(indir):
    if x.endswith('.py'):
        infile = os.path.join(indir, x)
        outfile = infile.replace('.py', '.html')
        code = ''.join(list(open(infile)))
        html = highlight(code, PythonLexer(), formatter)
        f = open(outfile, 'w')
        f.write(html)
        f.close()
        print 'finished :',x