Elixir Syntax Highlighting on Stackoverflow

If anyone still cares about this, a quick upvote here could help: https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/360682/syntax-highlight-request-elixir

We’re half way through 2018 and there’s still no Elixir syntax highlighting on Stackoverflow – That’s disappointing. I just opened a support thread on Meta, asking for help on the topic:

Allow me to bump the topic, since I run into ugly, non-highligthed code on SO once more and it boiled my blood a bit again.

To summarise the situation, the feature has been requested four and a half years ago and about a year ago I wrote the highlighter necessary for the SO people to integrate Elixir highlighting with their site without breaking much of a sweat. Still, there hasn’t been any progress on the issue since, and it looks like SO has a policy on not improving syntax highlighting on the site ever again.

While I have no reason to be optimistic about the whole situation, it feels like it would be good to raise the profile of the feature request, or otherwise nothing is going to change. From what I’m reading the best bet is to upvote the request and add/or add a bounty for it. I’d happily do it myself, but I don’t have enough karma on Meta Stack Exchange…

Soo I guess what I’m saying is: Does anyone have some Meta Stack Exchange karma to use for a good cause? :]

Edit: I’m curious, which of the other Most Loved Languages according to SO Developer Survey 2017 don’t have the syntax highlighting support

Thanks for the feedback, @notriddle!

You’re definitely right about the string inside string interpolation case. I’ll try and fix it soon.

I was in two minds whether to make %{"THIS": :foo} highlight as an atom or not. I decided to go with the string highlighting because it made the string detection much faster, using some short circuiting logic in the code. But in the end I think you’re right on that one as well, and I should make it display as atom as well.

Your example here:

%{foo: :bar, "yes, this compiles": :"also an atom"}

Both of them are atoms; :“also an atom” and :“yes, this compiles” are both atoms. Your syntax hilighter thinks that “yes, this compiles” is a string.

iex(1)> %{ "yes, this compiles": :"also an atom" } |> Enum.map(fn {key, val} -> is_atom key end)
[true]

Breaks when I type this in:

"I love me some #{ "string" <> "y" } interpolation"

It might not support hilighting inside string interpolation, but it should at least ignore quotes inside of an interpolated part, so it doesn’t just look wrong.

Cool, better syntax highlighting on popular syntax highlighters, even if the syntax highlighter itself is stupidly made in regex but nothing you can do about that, is still a great help due to the visibility!

It feels like I’m mostly talking to myself here, but here’s the PR for the Elixir support: Add Elixir language support by nietaki · Pull Request #478 · googlearchive/code-prettify · GitHub

I have tried the highlighting with some more code and ironed out some issues. An updated interactive demo still available on rawgit.

I’m aiming to write some tests and submit a PR this weekend, so if you have any feedback, speak up

Don’t look in the source then It is what it is though, as long as it makes the StackOverflow questions/answers more readable, I’m a happy person.