Syntax highlighting is a feature of some text editors. It is used in programming, scripting, or markup languages like HTML.

When people argue about whether syntax highlighting is a good idea or not, they tend to pull out the same old arguments and dust them off. Syntax highlighting is when the editor understands something about the syntax of your program and displays different language constructs in different fonts. For example, cperl-mode displays strings in reddish brown, comments in a sort of brick color, declared variables (in my) in gold, built-in function names (defined) in green, subroutine names in blue, labels in teal, and keywords (like my and for each) in purple. There are two components to syntax highlighting:

Tokenization: Breaking text into a list of tokens

Theming: Using themes or user settings to map the tokens to specific colors and styles

All programmers know that as you program a website, one of the easiest ways to boost the readability and context of the text you are working on is by using a text editor with syntax highlighting. The text editor is a system or program that allows a user to edit text. Software programmers and web developers use text editors to write and edit in programming and markup languages. This is one of the primary purposes of text editors.

What is Tokenization?

According to tutorials Point, Tokenization may be defined as the process of breaking up a piece of text into smaller parts, such as sentences and words. These smaller parts are called tokens. For example, a word is a token in a sentence, and a sentence is a token in a paragraph.

As we know that NLP is used to build applications such as sentiment analysis, QA systems, language translation, smart chatbots, voice systems, etc., hence, to build them, it becomes vital to understand the pattern in the text. The tokens, mentioned above, are very useful in finding and understanding these patterns. We can consider tokenization as the base step for other recipes such as stemming and lemmatization.

Pros of syntax highlighting

Syntax Highlighting or Code Coloring has many advantages, a few of them are as follows:

• It becomes easier to read code and recognize its structure. Color highlighting is not important for a machine, but it is for developers. As a result, code reviews, for example, are (selectively) easier.
• The implementation of code is easier because the highlighting is done in real-time and typing errors can be detected faster. Wrong keywords can also be identified more quickly because they are not colored. This leads to a higher performance during development, especially since modern editors no longer suffer from performance losses due to coloring / converting.
• In many editors and development environments, the highlighting scheme can be individually adapted, so that the fun of developing is also increased.

Best code syntax highlighter javascript plugins

Rainbow

Rainbow is a code syntax highlighting library written in Javascript. It was designed to be lightweight (2.5kb), easy to use, and extendable. It is completely themeable via CSS. Rainbow on its own is very simple. It goes through code blocks, processes regex patterns, and wraps matching patterns in tags.

SHJS

SHJS is a JavaScript script that highlights source code passages in HTML documents. Documents using SHJS are highlighted on the client side by the web browser. SHJS uses language definitions from GNU Source-highlight. This gives SHJS the ability to highlight source code written in many different languages.

Prism.js

Prism is a lightweight, extensible syntax highlighter, built with modern web standards in mind. It's used on thousands of websites, including some of those you visit daily.

All styling is done through CSS, with sensible class names. comment, .string, .property etc. You can choose one of the seven available themes. Prism doesn't support IE 6-8.