Library API

Highilght.js exports a few functions as methods of the hljs object.

Core highlighting function. Accepts a language name and a string with the code to highlight. Returns an object with the following properties:

• language: language name, same as the one passed into a function, returned for consistency with highlightAuto
• relevance: integer value
• keyword_count integer value
• value: HTML string with highlighting markup

Highlighting with language detection. Accepts a string with the code to highlight. Returns an object with the following properties:

• language: detected language
• relevance: integer value
• keyword_count: integer value
• value: HTML string with highlighting markup
• second_best: object with the same structure for second-best heuristically detected language, may be absent

Post-processing of the highlighted markup. Accepts a string with the highlighted markup and two optional values:

• tabReplace: arbitrary string (may contain HTML) to replace TAB characters with
• useBR: a boolean flag to replace real line-breaks with <br> which is useful for non-<pre> containers

Applies highlighting to a DOM node containing code. Accepts a DOM node and two optional parameters for fixMarkup.

This function is the one to use to apply highlighting dynamically after page load or within initialization code of third-party Javascript frameworks.

Applies highlighting to all <pre><code>..</code></pre> blocks on a page.

To control tab replacement use global flags on hljs object before initialization:

hljs.tabReplace = '    '; //4 spaces
hljs.initHighlighting();

Attaches highlighting to the page load event.