Pasting code with syntax coloring in emails

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Tip 198 Previous Next created 2002 · complexity basic · author Hari Krishna Dara · version 6.0

Many file types can be displayed with syntax highlighting. :help syntax

Vim provides a script that can create an html document (including the foreground and background colors, and syntax highlighting) from the current file, or from selected lines. :help convert-to-HTML

[edit] Creating html

In gvim, use "Convert to HTML" on the Syntax menu. A new file is created, containing the html equivalent of all text from the current buffer.

The same operation can be performed by entering a command:

:TOhtml

If you visually select some lines before entering :TOhtml, only the selected lines will be converted.

If your color scheme uses a dark background, you may want to temporarily switch to a white background before creating the html document. One way to do that is to use the command:

:colorscheme default

[edit] Using the html

Of course the html file created by :TOhtml can be used on a web site. In addition, on some systems it may be useful to open the html file in a web browser for printing. On Windows, you can copy text from within Internet Explorer, and paste it into some other applications in RTF format.

[edit] Modifying the html

The html generated by :TOhtml places the color of the background and default foreground into the tag <body>. If the code is pasted into an html-enabled web forum, those colors disappear.

This function solves the problem:

function! MyToHtml(line1, line2)
  exec a:line1.','.a:line2.'TOhtml'
  %g/<body/normal k$dgg
  %s/<body\s*\(bgcolor="[^"]*"\)\s*text=\("[^"]*"\)\s*>/<table \1 cellPadding=0><tr><td><font color=\2>/
  %s#</body>\(.\|\n\)*</html>#\='</font></td></tr><tr><td><font color=white><span style="float: right;color: '.synIDattr(44,"fg").'"><i><small>Generated with Vim(<a style="color: '.synIDattr(44,"fg").'" href="[[VimTip1174>tip]] \#1174</a>)</small></i></span></font></td></tr></table>'#i
endfunction
command -range=% MyToHtml :call MyToHtml(<line1>,<line2>)

Now you can select a range of lines, type :MyToHtml and use the result to post your code to an html-enabled web forum.

TO DO

Confirm that MyToHtml is doing something useful.
Remove the "Generated with Vim...1174" noise added by MyToHtml.

[edit] Comments

There is a Perl module Text::VimColor that runs Vim to generate HTML or XML automatically. There are some usage notes.