Plugin API

Highlight.js supports plugins. You add plugins via the addPlugin API.

// a plugin can be a class
addPlugin(new SimplePlugin());
addPlugin(new MoreComplexPlugin(options));

// or simply a keyed object of functions
addPlugin({
  'after:highlightElement': ({ el, result, text }) => {
    // ...
  }
});

Types of plugins

Class based plugins

This approach is useful for more complex plugins that need to deal with configuration options or managing state. Highlight.js will instantiate a single instance of your class and execute it’s callbacks as necessary.

class DataLanguagePlugin {
  constructor(options) {
    self.prefix = options.dataPrefix;
  }

  'after:highlightElement'({ el, result, text }) {
    // ...
  }
}

hljs.addPlugin(new DataLanguagePlugin({ dataPrefix: 'hljs' }));

Function Based Plugins

This approach is best for simpler plugins.

hljs.addPlugin({
  'after:highlightElement': ({ el, result }) => {
    // move the language from the result into the dataset
    el.dataset.language = result.language;
  }
});

before:highlight

before:highlight({code, language})

This callback function is passed a context object with two keys:

code: The code to be highlighted.
language: The language grammar that should be used for highlighting.

Your plugin may modify either value and those new values will be used as input to the highlighting engine. If you add a result key to the object that result will be returned as the overall result and the internal highlighting code will never even be called.

If you’re plugin plans to make its own recursive calls to highlight you’ll need to manually handle this. Each time highlight is called your plugin callbacks will also be called - making it easy to get into an infinite loop. You’ll likely need to use a class based plugin and add a guard so that your plugin code is only triggered on the initial call to highlight and not on any internal calls your plugin itself is making.

Note: This callback does not fire from highlighting resulting from auto-language detection.

It returns nothing.

after:highlight

after:highlight(result)

This callback function is passed the result object after highlighting is complete. Your plugin may make any changes it desires to the result object and that will be the final return value of the initial call to highlight.

Note: This callback does not fire from highlighting resulting from auto-language detection.

It returns nothing.

after:highlightElement

after:highlightElement({el, result, text})

This callback function is passed an object with two keys:

el: The HTML element that’s been highlighted.
result: The result object returned by highlight or highlightAuto.
text: The raw text that was to be highlighted.

It returns nothing.

before:highlightElement

before:highlightElement({el, language})

This callback function is passed an object with two keys:

el: The HTML element that will be highlighted.
language: The language determined from the class attribute (or undefined).

It returns nothing.

Deprecated

after:highlightBlock

Deprecated since version 10.7: Please use after:highlightElement.

before:highlightBlock

Deprecated since version 10.7: Please use before:highlightElement.