I finally pushed highlight to CRAN, which should be available in a few days. The package uses the information gathered by the parser package to perform syntax highlighting of R code

The main function of the package is highlight, which takes a number of argument including :

  • file : the file in which the R code is
  • output : some output connection or file name where to write the result (The default is standard output)
  • renderer : a collection of function controlling how to render code into a given markup language

The package ships three functions that create such renderers

  • renderer_html : renders in html/css
  • renderer_latex: renders in latex
  • renderer_verbatim: does nothing

And additionally, the xterm256 package defines a renderer that allows syntax highlighting directly in the console (if the console knows xterm 256 colors)

Let's assume we have this code file (/tmp/code.R) 

f 


Then we can syntax highlight it like this :



> highlight( "/tmp/code.R", renderer = renderer_html(), output = "/tmp/code.R.html" )
> highlight( "/tmp/code.R", renderer = renderer_latex(), output = "/tmp/code.R.latex" )




which makes these files : code.R.html and code.R.latex



The package also ships a sweave driver that can highlight code chunks in a sweave document, but I'll talk about this in another post