Syntax Highlighting And Colorizing In React Components

React provides an easy way to connect styling and colorizing possibilities both to components and to HTML elements. Syntax highlighting and colorizing of code blocks in React-based web pages has become increasingly popular for developing applications with a modern and professional look.

With the invention of React components, the task of colorizing code and syntax highlighting require a bit more work than before. This is due to the fact that React components must be self-contained and, when needed, properly isolated from other components and the global scope.

Fortunately, there are several popular libraries that make it surprisingly easy to implement syntax highlighting in React components. In this blog post, we will go through the process of colorizing code units in a React component and explain why it is important for user experience.

Syntax Highlighting

Syntax highlighting is a process of formatting code blocks to make them more interpretable to the reader. It involves identifying special elements in the code and adding corresponding color coding and labels.

The most common syntax highlighting technique uses color coding. For example, keywords are typically highlighted in a different color than plain text to make the code more readable and easier to scan.

Syntax highlighters can also add labels to each code block. This makes the code individualized, more organized and easier to read.

In general, syntax highlighting and colorizing are essential parts of user experience. The better you can make code portions read and improved, the more clarity users have when understanding your code.

Syntax Highlighting Implementations

The process of syntax highlighting in React is relatively simple. Let’s assume that we have a source code block already:

import React from 'react';

const App= () => {
  return (
    <div>
      <h1>Welcome to my site!</h1>
    </div>
  ) 
}

We must transform this code block into a React element to be rendered in the view. For that, we can use the React-Syntax-Highlighter library:

import React from 'react';
import SyntaxHighlighter from 'react-syntax-highlighter';

const App= () => {
  return (
    <div>
      <h1>Welcome to my site!</h1>
      <SyntaxHighlighter language='js'>
        {`
          import React from 'react';

          const App= () => {
            return (
              <div>
                <h1>Welcome to my site!</h1>
              </div>
            ) 
          }
        `}
      </SyntaxHighlighter>
    </div>
  ) 
}

Now, we can easily specify the style of syntax highlighting that we want to use. There are several popular syntax highlighting styles libraries like Prism.js and Highlight.js. We can also use custom styles.

The SyntaxHighlighter element takes a style argument with name of the style type (like 'prism') or a custom set of style options (like {background: '#FFFFFF', fontSize: '18px'};).

Colorizing React Components

In addition to syntax highlighting for code blocks, it is often necessary to colorize entire React components or HTML elements.

To do so, one must use a styling library like styled-components. This popular library enables you to easily define styles for a given element and add custom colors, padding, font type, etc.

For example, you can define a custom header style with a styled() function:

import React from 'react';
import styled from 'styled-components';

const Header = styled.h1`
  font-size: 30px;
  color: #3333FF;
`;

const App= () => {
  return (
    <div>
      <Header>Welcome to my site!</Header>
    </div>
  ) 
}

Conclusion

Adding syntax highlighting and colorizing to your React components is an essential part of modern web user experience. There are several popular libraries that enable you to easily implement these features. With a bit of extra work, you can improve the look and feel of your React-based websites or web applications.