Highlight SAS and Stata

SAS and Stata syntax highlighting for various highliters.

Implementations

This repo contains SAS and Stata highlighting implementations for

• Pygments, a syntax highlighter written in python. I wrote this to use with minted, a LaTeX code highlighter uses pygments.
• Listings, a LaTeX implementation of syntax highlighting.
• Highlight.js, a syntax highlighter written in JavaScript. (SAS only; Stata was already available).

In addition, I keep (very) slightly modified copies for:

• Pandoc, a document converter that converts Markdown into a wide array of formats. The syntax highlighting works for PDF, DOCX, and HTML output.

Pandoc uses the XML-based skylighting library and I did not write the highlighters here; I mainly keep the slightly modified copies for my own convenience.

This project started with me using listings and minted from LaTeX. Since I code in vim, I also wrote a short script to highlight code in LaTeX using the appropriate syntax/<lang>.vim. See here.

If you code in Atom, I heartily recommend @kylebarron's excellent language-stata; he is also responsible for several suggestions and improvements to this repo.

Minted and Pygments

Minted is a LaTeX package that uses pygments to highlight code. Pygments is quite complex and has a lot of options, but this means highlighting here should be free of any issues. I added sas.py style to match the SAS editor and stata.py style to match my preferred dark Stata colorscheme (styles are just a list of types and colors, so defining them is quite easy).

Al older version of the SAS and Stata lexers were accepted into the main branch for pygments 2.2; you can try highlighting code on the pygments project website. However, some bugs have been fixed in the Stata lexer since. To update, copy the lexer from this repo into your pygments installation. For instance,

rootpypkg=`python -c "import site; print(site.getsitepackages()[0])"`
ls -sf $PWD/pygments/pygments/lexers/stata.py ${rootpypkg}/pygments/lexers/stata.py

Pandoc

The XML files to highlight Stata and SAS are here for Stata and here for SAS. To use them with Pandoc, supply them with the --syntax-definitions option on the command line.

pandoc document_with_stata.md -o document_with_stata.pdf --syntax-definition=stata.xml

The example file at lib/sample-pandoc.md can be compiled into lib/compiled/sample-pandoc.html with

pandoc lib/sample-pandoc.md \
    -o lib/compiled/sample-pandoc.html \
    --syntax-definition=skylighting/stata.xml \
    --syntax-definition=skylighting/sas.xml \
    --highlight-style=tango --standalone

or compiled into lib/compiled/sample-pandoc.pdf with

pandoc lib/sample-pandoc.md \
    -o lib/compiled/sample-pandoc.pdf \
    --syntax-definition=skylighting/stata.xml \
    --syntax-definition=skylighting/sas.xml \
    --highlight-style=tango --standalone

and similarly with docx and other formats. This requires Pandoc 2.0 or higher.

Listings

I used to use this before I discovered minted and pygments. Defining a package is extremely hard because the implementation is in TeX and it has all those limitations. I include it here because not everyone can or wants to go through installing pygments, but the drawback is that there will be highlighting quirks and errors I am unsure how to deal with.

To install, from a bash prompt

localtexmf=`kpsewhich -var-value=TEXMFHOME`/tex/latex/local
mkdir -p $localtexmf
cp -s $PWD/listings/lstsas.tex   $localtexmf/lstsas.tex
cp -s $PWD/listings/lststata.tex $localtexmf/lststata.tex

Now add this to your preamble

\input{lstsas}
\input{lststata}

Highlight.js

This already had Stata support. I added SAS support only, mainly to use with Redmine. Defining the languages was pretty simple, and it should be mostly fine, but I don't think I have as fine-grained control as with Pygments. I did add sas.css and stata.css styles to match the SAS and Stata editors (styles are pretty straightforward CSS files).

I opened a pull request that has recently been accepted. To install, simply install highlight.js.