What is prismjs?
PrismJS is a lightweight, extensible syntax highlighter, built with modern web standards in mind. It's used to make code snippets in web pages prettier and more readable. It supports a wide range of programming languages and comes with a variety of themes.
What are prismjs's main functionalities?
Syntax Highlighting
This feature allows you to highlight syntax of various programming languages. The code sample demonstrates how to highlight JavaScript code using PrismJS.
Prism.highlight(code, Prism.languages.javascript, 'javascript');
Extensible Language Definitions
PrismJS allows you to extend existing language definitions to add new patterns or modify existing ones. The code sample shows how to add a new pattern to the JavaScript language definition.
Prism.languages.insertBefore('javascript', 'function-variable', {
'function-variable': {
pattern: /\bvar\s+[a-z0-9_]+\s*=\s*function\b/,
alias: 'function'
}
});
Custom Hooks
You can add custom hooks to modify code or the environment before or after the highlighting process. The code sample demonstrates a hook that replaces occurrences of 'foo' with 'bar' before highlighting.
Prism.hooks.add('before-highlight', function(env) {
env.code = env.element.textContent.replace(/\bfoo\b/g, 'bar');
});
Themes
PrismJS comes with a variety of themes that can be easily included in your web page to change the appearance of highlighted code. The code sample shows how to include a PrismJS theme in an HTML document.
<link href="themes/prism.css" rel="stylesheet" />
Plugins
PrismJS supports plugins that add additional functionality, such as displaying line numbers. The code sample demonstrates how to include the line numbers plugin.
<script src="plugins/line-numbers/prism-line-numbers.js"></script>
Other packages similar to prismjs
highlight.js
Highlight.js is another popular syntax highlighter that is often compared to PrismJS. It supports more languages out of the box and is used by many projects. However, it is larger in size compared to PrismJS, which aims to be lightweight.
shjs
SHJS is a JavaScript syntax highlighting engine that can highlight source code in HTML documents. It is less popular and not as actively maintained as PrismJS, and it has a smaller community and fewer features.
rainbow
Rainbow is a small, fast, and customizable option for syntax highlighting. It is similar to PrismJS in terms of goals and size, but it has a different plugin system and fewer languages supported by default.
syntaxhighlighter
SyntaxHighlighter is a fully functional self-contained code syntax highlighter developed in JavaScript. It is one of the older options available and offers a wide range of themes and brushes (language definitions), but it is bulkier compared to PrismJS.