Working with SyntaxHighlighter in Blogger Simplified - Updated

I’ve been attempting to clean up my blog and make it a little more user friendly for myself and visitors, and given that it’s a blog by a developer there is bound to be a code sample or two posted on it. When I see a code sample on a site I like to be able to scroll the code block to see the full thing, or highlight sections to copy if I like. Needless to say, it’s important to display code samples properly on a blog for coding.

When I was first throwing this blog together I searched for the best approach to displaying code samples. Some people were using SyntaxHighlighter with some tweaks and troubles here and there; others said the simplest approach was to just create a GitHub Gist and copy the Gist embed URL into your post. The Gist approach seemed the simplest so I decided to go with that to start. Well, now that I tackled that with all the effort it took (none, seriously) I decided to try my hand at SyntaxHighlighter.

Properly adding Javascript in Blogger templates

Back in March, I wrote a post about a simplified method to use Syntax Highlighter in Blogger posts. The method utilizes a script I wrote so that I don't have to directly modify the html in a post (Working with Syntax Highlighter in Blogger Simplified). One of the issues I have run into with various scripts that have been posted, mine included, is the handling of special characters in the script. In certain conditions you need to look for an angle bracket or an ampersand using your script, and those special characters will break the Blogger parser when you attempt to add them directly in your script. In those examples, again, mine included, the special characters in the script have been replaced with their entity codes (see references below). For example, you can't simply add "<br>'.replace('<br/><br/>');" in a Blogger script.

After I posted that, I had a realization that you can simplify that condition, and future situations surrounding the use of Javascript in Blogger. Well, I finally got around to doing a quick test, and it seems to work without issue.