Mode reference

    Attributes

    type: boolean

    Case insensitivity of language keywords and regexps. Used only on the top-level mode.

    aliases

    type: array

    A list of additional names (besides the canonical one given by the filename) that can be used to identify a language in HTML classes and in a call to getLanguage.

    className

    type: identifier

    The name of the mode. It is used as a class name in HTML markup.

    Multiple modes can have the same name. This is useful when a language has multiple variants of syntaxfor one thing like string in single or double quotes.

    begin

    type: regexp

    Regular expression starting a mode. For example a single quote for strings or two forward slashes for C-style comments.If absent, begin defaults to a regexp that matches anything, so the mode starts immediately.

    end

    type: regexp

    Regular expression ending a mode. For example a single quote for strings or “$” (end of line) for one-line comments.

    It’s often the case that a beginning regular expression defines the entire mode and doesn’t need any special ending.For example a number can be defined with begin: "\b\d+" which spans all the digits.

    If absent, end defaults to a regexp that matches anything, so the mode ends immediately.

    Sometimes a mode can end not by itself but implicitly with its containing (parent) mode.This is achieved with endsWithParent attribute.

    beginKeywords

    type: string

    Used instead of begin for modes starting with keywords to avoid needless repetition:

    … becomes:

    1. {
    2.   beginKeywords: 'extends implements'
    3. }

    Unlike the keywords attribute, this one allows only a simple list of space separated keywords.If you do need additional features of or you just need more keywords for this mode you may include keywords along with beginKeywords.

    A flag showing that a mode ends when its parent ends.

    This is best demonstrated by example. In CSS syntax a selector has a set of rules contained within symbols “{” and “}”.Individual rules separated by ”;” but the last one in a set can omit the terminating semicolon:

    1. p {
    2.   width: 100%; color: red
    3. }

    This is when endsWithParent comes into play:

    endsParent

    type: boolean

    Forces closing of the parent mode right after the current mode is closed.

    This is used for modes that don’t have an easily expressible ending lexeme butinstead could be closed after the last interesting sub-mode is found.

    Here’s an example with two ways of defining functions in Elixir, one using akeyword do and another using a comma:

    1. def foo :clear, list do
    2.   :ok
    3. end
    4.  
    5. def foo, do: IO.puts "hello world"

    Note that in the first case the parameter list after the function title may alsoinclude a comma. And iIf we’re only interested in highlighting a title we cantell it to end the function definition after itself:

    1. {
    2.   className: 'function',
    3.   beginKeywords: 'def', end: /\B\b/,
    4.     {
    5.       className: 'title',
    6.       begin: hljs.IDENT_RE, endsParent: true
    7.     }
    8.   ]
    9. }

    (The end: /\B\b/ regex tells function to never end by itself.)

    lexemes

    type: regexp

    A regular expression that extracts individual lexemes from language text to find among them.Default value is hljs.IDENT_RE which works for most languages.

    keywords

    type: object

    Keyword definition comes in two forms:

    • 'for while if else weird_voodoo|10 … ' – a string of space-separated keywords with an optional relevance over a pipe
    • {'keyword': ' … ', 'literal': ' … '} – an object whose keys are names of different kinds of keywords and values are keyword definition strings in the first form
      For detailed explanation see .

    illegal

    type: regexp

    A regular expression that defines symbols illegal for the mode.When the parser finds a match for illegal expression it immediately drops parsing the whole language altogether.

    excludeBegin, excludeEnd

    type: boolean

    Exclude beginning or ending lexemes out of mode’s generated markup. For example in CSS syntax a rule ends with a semicolon.However visually it’s better not to color it as the rule contents. Having forces a <span> element for the rule to close before the semicolon.

    type: boolean

    Since the parser is effectively goes back it’s quite possible to create a infinite loop here so use with caution!

    returnEnd

    type: boolean

    Returns just found ending lexeme back into parser. This is used for example to parse Javascript embedded into HTML.A Javascript block ends with the HTML closing tag </script> that cannot be parsed with Javascript rules.So it is returned back into its parent HTML mode that knows what to do with it.

    Since the parser is effectively goes back it’s quite possible to create a infinite loop here so use with caution!

    contains

    type: array

    The list of sub-modes that can be found inside the mode. For detailed explanation see Language definition guide.

    starts

    type: identifier

    The name of the mode that will start right after the current mode ends. The new mode won’t be contained within the current one.

    Currently this attribute is used to highlight Javascript and CSS contained within HTML.Tags <script> and <style> start sub-modes that use another language definition to parse their contents (see subLanguage).

    variants

    type: array

    Modification to the main definitions of the mode, effectively expanding it into several similar modeseach having all the attributes from the main definition augmented or overridden by the variants:

    subLanguage

    type: string or array

    Highlights the entire contents of the mode with another language.

    When using this attribute there’s no point to define internal parsing rules like or keywords. Also it is recommended to skip className attribute since the sublanguage will wrap the text in its own <span class="language-name">.

    The value of the attribute controls which language or languages will be used for highlighting:

    • language name: explicit highlighting with the specified language
    • empty array: auto detection with all the languages available
    • array of language names: auto detection constrained to the specified set

    type: boolean

    Skips any markup processing for the mode ensuring that it remains a part of itsparent buffer along with the starting and the ending lexemes. This works inconjunction with the parent’s when it requires complexparsing.

    Consider parsing PHP inside HTML:

    1. <p><? echo 'PHP'; /* ?> */ ?></p>
    1. {
    2.   begin: /<\?/, end: /\?>/,
    3.   subLanguage: 'php',
    4.   contains: [{begin: '/\\*', end: '\\*/', skip: true}]
    5. }

    Without skip: true every comment would cause the parser to drop out backinto the HTML mode.