Format Code Inside PRE Tags within TextMate Using PHP

By  on  

Creating blog posts has been greatly sped up by the use of TextMate. I've created a bunch of blog formatting commands to do various operations on posts including adding paragraph tags, formatting headings, and generating content based on string templates. One of my favorites is a PHP function that html-entitizes (your word of the day) code with PRE tags.

The PHP

function replace_angles($matches) {
return str_replace($matches[1],htmlentities($matches[1]),$matches[0]);
}
$file = file_get_contents('php://stdin');
$file = preg_replace_callback('/<pre.*?>(.*?)<\/pre>/imsu',replace_angles, $file);
echo $file;

The first step is reading in the buffer's contents. The next step is using PHP to extract the PRE code and replace it with htmlentities(code). Mission accomplished! I use this frequently within my blog -- maybe you can too.

Recent Features

  • By
    I&#8217;m an Impostor

    This is the hardest thing I've ever had to write, much less admit to myself.  I've written resignation letters from jobs I've loved, I've ended relationships, I've failed at a host of tasks, and let myself down in my life.  All of those feelings were very...

  • By
    An Interview with Eric Meyer

    Your early CSS books were instrumental in pushing my love for front end technologies. What was it about CSS that you fell in love with and drove you to write about it? At first blush, it was the simplicity of it as compared to the table-and-spacer...

Incredible Demos

Discussion

  1. Have you looked into using markdown in textmate instead? It’s already got a lot of what you’re talking about :D

  2. Dave Demon

    hello Sir,
    I would like to ask u some question. I tried to use htmlentities like that
    htmlentities('hello', ENT_QUOTES);
    but it is not working. (also htmlspecialchars ) I would like to know how to do this problem.

Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!