Example for a simple custom highlighter

[Andre601]

Currently try to wrap my head around adding a own custom highlighter (In this case for inlineHilite), but I struggle to really understand how it would work here...

My goal is to have a highlighting similar to HTML, where the content within <text> tags is changed... Just extended to also include [] and {} variants (While not changing special characters like |).

Quick mockup I made using dev tools:

Could you give a small example that could explain this to me a bit better? Would apreciate it a lot as I have a hard time finding the right page explaining this further...

[facelessuser]

You are asking about a custom Pygments highlighter?

[Andre601]

Yes. I ask about a basic example of highlighting code with a custom highlighter.

Have some troubles understanding it... I know I define a method that in my case probs should return HTML, but I can't quite figure out where I would put this file and if it needs anything else...
Is there a doc explaining this?

[facelessuser]

If are wanting highlighting, you should write a Pygments lexer, install it, and then it will be available, no custom inline needed. I have a couple custom lexers I've written here: https://github.com/facelessuser/pymdown-lexers/tree/master/pymdown_lexers.

[Andre601]

Okay. Need to look at it a bit...
I assume I add it to pygment itself? Or would I do that within the configuration somewhere?

[facelessuser]

Pygments requires that the extension is registered under the appropriate entry point. https://github.com/facelessuser/pymdown-lexers/blob/master/setup.py#L5

Now, can custom lexers be used without registering them under the entry point? Maybe? But I haven't dug too deep into that. If there is a way to dynamically load them without registering them under an entry point, I'd love to know how to do that, I just haven't looked into it.

[Andre601]

Okay... I looked into pygment itself to see how they do it within their HTML lexer and... my head hurts now 😅

I never was really good at decoding regex here, so I'll pass on this custom highlighting stuff for now (The HTML highlighting aproach I use right now works good enough for me).
Thanks tho for the detailed info. Apreciate it a lot.

[facelessuser]

You could do it without a lexer. I have one where we do mathjax wrapping: https://github.com/facelessuser/pymdown-extensions/blob/main/pymdownx/arithmatex.py#L127. You could replace that code with some other approach if you like.