hscolourhscolour is a small Haskell script to colourise Haskell code. It currently has five output formats: ANSI terminal codes, HTML 3.2 with <font> tags, HTML 4.01 with CSS, LaTeX, and mIRC chat client codes. Example
Here's a little example of the HTML output: module Main (main) where import Prelude -- The notorious nfib "benchmark", but using Doubles. main = print (nfib 30) nfib :: Double -> Double nfib n = if n <= 1 then 1 else nfib (n`subtract`1) + nfib (n`subtract`2) + 1 Download
BuildJust use one of the standard ways of building a Haskell program:
Use
You can colourise a Haskell source file for either ANSI terminal codes (option -tty), or HTML 3.2 with font tags (option -html), or HTML 4.01 output with CSS (option -css), or for LaTeX (option -latex), or for IRC (option -mirc). The default is for terminal output. If no file argument is given, it reads standard input. Output is written to file OUTPUT (option -o), defaulting to stdout. HsColour can add named anchors in HTML (option -anchor) to top-level definitions in the source file (functions, datatypes, classes). This enables you to make links to a specific location in the generated file with the standard file.html#anchor notation (e.g. from haddock-generated library documentation). See below for details. If you want to embed several individual colourised fragments into a larger document, then use the -partial option with each fragment, to omit the HTML DOCTYPE header, CSS stylesheet link, or LaTeX prologue. Alternatively, if you have a literate input source (e.g. .lhs file), then the -lit option will pass the literate parts untouched, and colourise only the code fragments (indicated by Bird-tracks - a > in the left-most column), as if each was called individually with -partial. Configuration of coloursIf you use either -html, -tty, -mirc, or -latex, you can configure the colours for different lexical entities by editing a configuration file called .hscolour in the current directory. (An example is included in the distribution.) For CSS output, it is sufficient to edit the hscolour.css file, also in the distribution. The -print-css option prints out the default CSS definitions, in case you lose the .css file. The .hscolour file format is a simple Haskell value of type ColourPrefs, constructed using named fields, as follows: data ColourPrefs = ColourPrefs { keyword, keyglyph, layout, comment , conid, varid, conop, varop , string, char, number , cpp , selection, variantselection , definition :: [Highlight] } data Colour = Black | Red | Green | Yellow | Blue | Magenta | Cyan | White data Highlight = Normal | Bold | Dim | Underscore | Blink | ReverseVideo | Concealed | Foreground Colour | Background Colour
Use it as a libraryIf you want to incorporate hscolour-like functionality into your own Haskell program, it is now (from 1.4) also available as a library, thanks to Björn Bringert. The library is Cabal-ised, so just do the usual thing to install it as a package:
Using HsColour with HaddockLet's say you want to generate some pretty-coloured HTML versions of your source files, at the same time as you are generating library documentation using Haddock. Haddock (0.8 onwards) has options to link the API docs to the source code itself. Here is a quick summary of the shell commands to use:for file in $(SRCS) do HsColour -html -anchor $file >docs/`dirname $file`/`basename $file .hs`.html done haddock --html --title="My Library" --odir=docs $(SRCS) \ --source-module="src/%{MODULE/.//}.html" \ --source-entity="src/%{MODULE/.//}.html#%{NAME}"
Copyright and licencehscolour is © Malcolm Wallace 2003-2007. It is distributed under the Gnu GPL, which can be found in the file LICENCE-GPL.ShortcomingsHsColour is not yet able to add anchors to class methods, nor to foreign decls. AlternativesThe Programatica project has a more sophisticated HTML syntax-highlighter. It hyperlinks every usage of an identifier to its definition, which is highly useful for browsing large amounts of code. However, it is a more heavyweight solution as well - requiring the entire front-end of a compiler not only to parse the Haskell code, but to chase all its module dependencies as well. As a consequence, you need source access to every definition used in your program, including the Prelude and all library packages... History
This page last modified: 8th Jan 2008 |