Pygments pygmentize pass string - php

Question

I decided to use Pygments for a website I'm working on, but my lack of terminal knowledge is amazing.
I want to use pygmentize to highlight syntax in blog posts, but as they are stored in database I can't just pass filename to it. Is there any way I can pass string into it?
If not, I will have to save post contents in a temp file, pygmentize it and load into database but this adds overhead that I would really like to avoid if at all possible.
I don't see CLI documentation saying anything about it.

Answer 1

The man page says it reads from stdin if infile is omitted and it writes to stdout if outfile is omitted.
So on the cmdline you would type:
$ pymentize -l php -f html
<?php
echo 'hello world!';
^D // type: Control+D
pymentize would output:
<div class="highlight"><pre><span class="cp"><?php</span>
<span class="k">echo</span> <span class="s1">'hello world!'</span><span class="p">; </span>
</pre></div>
If you'll run this with from PHP you'll have to start pygmentize using proc_open() as you'll have to write to stdin of it. Here comes a short example how to do it:
echo pygmentize('<?php echo "hello world!\n"; ?>');
/**
* Highlights a source code string using pygmentize
*/
function pygmentize($string, $lexer = 'php', $format = 'html') {
// use proc open to start pygmentize
$descriptorspec = array (
array("pipe", "r"), // stdin
array("pipe", "w"), // stdout
array("pipe", "w"), // stderr
);
$cwd = dirname(__FILE__);
$env = array();
$proc = proc_open('/usr/bin/pygmentize -l ' . $lexer . ' -f ' . $format,
$descriptorspec, $pipes, $cwd, $env);
if(!is_resource($proc)) {
return false;
}
// now write $string to pygmentize's input
fwrite($pipes[0], $string);
fclose($pipes[0]);
// the result should be available on stdout
$result = stream_get_contents($pipes[1]);
fclose($pipes[1]);
// we don't care about stderr in this example
// just checking the return val of the cmd
$return_val = proc_close($proc);
if($return_val !== 0) {
return false;
}
return $result;
}
Btw, pygmentize is pretty cool stuff! I'm using it too :)