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
    JavaScript Promise API

    While synchronous code is easier to follow and debug, async is generally better for performance and flexibility. Why "hold up the show" when you can trigger numerous requests at once and then handle them when each is ready?  Promises are becoming a big part of the JavaScript world...

  • By
    Regular Expressions for the Rest of Us

    Sooner or later you'll run across a regular expression. With their cryptic syntax, confusing documentation and massive learning curve, most developers settle for copying and pasting them from StackOverflow and hoping they work. But what if you could decode regular expressions and harness their power? In...

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!