App::highlight - simple grep-like highlighter app
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
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.
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.
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.
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>>
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
This allows you to match case insensitively.
% cat words.txt | highlight --ignore-case 'BAZ' 'QuUx' foo bar <<baz>> qux [[quux]] corge
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.
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
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
Show the current version number
% highlight --version
Show a brief help message
% highlight --help
Copyright (C) 2010 Alex Balhatchet
Alex Balhatchet (kaoru@slackwise.net)
Windows support patch from Github user aero.
To install App::highlight, copy and paste the appropriate command in to your terminal.
cpanm
cpanm App::highlight
CPAN shell
perl -MCPAN -e shell install App::highlight
For more information on module installation, please visit the detailed CPAN module installation guide.