| Sys Admin Extraordinaire |

2010-12-30 Updated

2010-12-29 Initial post

I just installed the SyntaxHighlighter Evolved 3.1.1 plugin today and am testing it out.

I finally got around to looking into how to put syntax highlighted/formatted code blocks into my posts and eventually found SyntaxHighlighter. It seems to be the most popular plugin of its type, so I installed it. Even the WordPress documentation refers to it in the section on Posting Source Code. Installing this plugin was easy--just like any other plugin that I've installed.

But adding custom/third-party brushes (each brush highlights a specific computer language) took some work. You'd think that adding a brush would be as simple as downloading it to a location and clicking on a button to activate it, but apparently SyntaxHighlighter has not evolved (pun intended) to that point. Now that I know how to add a brush, it's easy to do, but you'd think that installing the brush should be easier than installing the actual plugin.

SyntaxHighlighter didn't come with a brush for batch files, so I found one here. It's the one named Batch (shBrushBat.js). I couldn't find any instructions for how to install that brush, so I wrote my own below. So a few hours later than I had expected, I got everything working and documented everything here. I could have just used the "text" tag for batch files, but of course, I had to take the long way and install this brush; you never learn anything doing things the easy way, so it was a good learning experience.

The SyntaxHighlighter author himself does have some general instructions for adding brushes, but I found these other general instructions a bit easier to follow.

Anyway, in a nutshell, here's how I installed Batch (shBrushBat.js), using these general instructions as reference:

1. Upload the file shBrushBat.js to wp-content/plugins/syntaxhighlighter/third-party-brushes/.
2. Edit the file syntaxhighlighter.php in wp-content/plugins/syntaxhighlighter/ (this can be done from within the WordPress plugin editor).
3. Find the the sections in that file begining with these two comments: // Register some popular third-party brushes and // Create list of brush aliases and map them to their real brushes.
4. Under // Register some popular third-party brushes, add this code to the bottom of that section:

wp_register_script( 'syntaxhighlighter-brush-bat', plugins_url('syntaxhighlighter/third-party-brushes/shBrushBat.js'), array('syntaxhighlighter-core'), '20101229');
// Note that '20101229' is the date that I added this brush. That number can be used for the version number, but this brush itself doesn't have a version number.
//  Per http://www.viper007bond.com/wordpress-plugins/syntaxhighlighter/adding-a-new-brush-language/,
//   it's "an arbitrary version number that you should change if you modify the file (to break browser caches)."

5. Under // Create list of brush aliases and map them to their real brushes, add this code to the bottom of that section:

'bat'           => 'bat',
'batch'         => 'bat',
'cmd'           => 'bat',

I've done a few tests below after setting everything up. Note that you can put the SyntaxHighlighter tags directly in a post while editing the post in Visual mode--you don't need to be in HTML mode.

I've noticed some weirdness where regular text near the code block gets changed to "preformatted" and I have to go back and change it to "paragraph." I'm not sure why that happens. It also looks like SyntaxHighlighter puts preformatted text into a box (either that or some other update/plugin did that because I never noticed it before in the posts where I have preformatted text).

It looks like SyntaxHighlighter uses client-side JavaScript to format the code blocks. This became obvious when I went to the plugin author's site and some of the code blocks didn't render correctly right away and sometimes I had to refresh the page (I'm using Firefox 3.6.12).

>> Here's a batch file (highlighted as "batch," which requires this brush: shBrushBat.js):

[batch]
@ECHO OFF
@COLOR E1
MODE CON: COLS=125 LINES=50
REM -r    Restart the computer
REM -f     Forces running applications to close without warning
REM  -t nn    Set timeout for shutdown to nn seconds
ECHO ********************************************************************
ECHO ********************************************************************
ECHO **** This will RESTART the computer. ****
ECHO **** To cancel, close the window by clicking on the X in the upper right corner. ****
ECHO **** To continue and reboot, press any key. ****
ECHO ********************************************************************
ECHO ********************************************************************
PAUSE
shutdown -r -f -t 3
[/batch]

>> Here's a VBS script (highlighted as "vb"):

Option Explicit
Dim objFSO, objFolderSrc1, objFolderDst1
Set objFSO = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")
Set objFolderSrc1 = objFSO.GetFolder("X:\P-Data")
Set objFolderDst1 = objFSO.GetFolder("Y:\Backup-P-Data")
Wscript.Echo "P-Data SRC: " & objFolderSrc1.Size & vbCRLF & "P-Data DST: " & objFolderDst1.Size
Set objFSO = Nothing
Set objFolderSrc1 = Nothing
Set objFolderDst1 = Nothing
Wscript.quit

>> Here's a PowerShell script (highlighted as "powershell"):

Add-PSSnapin VMware.VimAutomation.Core
$VMwareServer = "vmware-01"
$VMwareUser = "root"
$VMwarePassword = "P@ssw0rd"
Connect-VIServer -Server $VMwareServer -Protocol https -User $VMwareUser -Password $VMwarePassword
Get-VM
Write-Host "**** Press any key to continue. ****"
$x = $host.UI.RawUI.ReadKey("NoEcho,IncludeKeyDown")

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 29th, 2010 at 11:17 AM and is filed under Batch File, Blogging, PowerShell, Scripting / Batch File / Automation, VBScript. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.