NAME

App::highlight - simple grep-like highlighter app

SYNOPSIS

highlight is similar to grep, except that instead of removing non-matched lines it simply highlights words or lines which are matched.

% cat words.txt
foo
bar
baz
qux
quux
corge

% cat words.txt | grep ba
bar
baz

% cat words.txt | highlight ba
foo
<<ba>>r
<<ba>>z
qux
quux
corge

If you give multiple match parameters highlight will highlight each of them in a different color.

% cat words.txt | highlight ba qu
foo
<<ba>>r
<<ba>>z
[[qu]]x
[[qu]]ux
corge

Color Support

If you have Term::ANSIColor installed then the strings will be highlighted using terminal colors rather than using brackets.

Installing color support by installing Term::ANSIColor is highly reccommended.

To get color support on Microsoft Windows you should install Term::ANSIColor and Win32::Console::ANSI.

OPTIONS

color / c

This is the default if Term::ANSIColor is installed.

App::highlight will cycle through the colours:

red green yellow blue magenta cyan

If you do not have Term::ANSIColor installed and you specify --color or you do not specify --no-color then you will receive a warning.

no-color / C

This is the default if Term::ANSIColor is not installed.

App::highlight will cycle through the brackets:

<<match>> [[match]] ((match))  {{match}} **match** __match__

The examples in the rest of this document use this mode because showing color highlighting in POD documentation is not possible.

escape / e

This is the default and means that the strings passed in will be escaped so that no special characters exist.

% cat words.txt | highlight --escape 'ba' '[qux]'
foo
<<ba>>r
<<ba>>z
qux
quux
<<c>>org<<e>>

no-escape / n / regex / r

This allows you to specify a regular expression instead of a simple string.

% cat words.txt | highlight --no-escape 'ba' '[qux]'
foo
<<ba>>r
<<ba>>z
[[q]][[u]][[x]]
[[q]][[u]][[u]][[x]]
corge

ignore-case / i

This allows you to match case insensitively.

% cat words.txt | highlight --ignore-case 'BAZ' 'QuUx'
foo
bar
<<baz>>
qux
[[quux]]
corge

full-line / l

This makes highlight always highlight full lines of input, even when the full line is not matched.

% cat words.txt | highlight --full-line u
foo
bar
baz
<<qux>>
<<quux>>
corge

Note this is similar to '--no-escape "^.*match.*$"' but probably much more efficient.

one-color / o

Rather than cycling through multiple colors, this makes highlight always use the same color for all highlights.

Despite the name "one-color" this interacts with the --no-color option as you would expect.

% cat words.txt | highlight --one-color ba qu
foo
<<ba>>r
<<ba>>z
<<qu>>x
<<qu>>ux
corge

show-bad-spaces / b

With this option turned on whitespace characters which appear at the end of lines are colored red.

For users familiar with git, this is replicating the default behaviour of "git diff".

In non-color mode whitespace characters which appear at the end of lines are filled in with capital "X" characters instead.

% cat words_with_spaces | highlight --show-bad-spaces
test
test with spaces
test with spaces on the endXXXX
just spaces on the next line
XXXXXXXX
empty line next

end of test

version / v

Show the current version number

% highlight --version

help / h

Show a brief help message

% highlight --help

Copyright

Copyright (C) 2010 Alex Balhatchet

Author

Alex Balhatchet (kaoru@slackwise.net)

Windows support patch from Github user aero.