Template:Code/doc

Usage
Wraps a short span of text in  tags (see mw:Extension:SyntaxHighlight). This template should be used for short samples; longer content should use  or . See Help:Wiki markup for an explanation of what the various tags do.

If the content includes an equals sign (=), you must specify the parameter explicitly:.

The template uses the tag with the attribute. This works like the combination of the and  tags,  applied to the expanded wikitext. For example, will not render the word "wiki" in bold, and will render the tripled-single-quotes:


 * some wiki text

If the above example is declared as wikitext (via, the output is rendered as follows:


 * some wiki text

However, will still invoke the template:


 * a call

Use  around the template name to avoid this problem:


 * a call

When used inline with regular text, generally looks best and is easiest to read when it is explicitly spaced apart from the regular text:
 * foo bar baz quux.

is well spaced:
 * foo bar baz  quux.

versus:
 * foo bar baz quux.

which is less visually clear:
 * foo bar baz quux.

because "foo" and "bar" will seem more closely associated than "bar" and "baz"; the width of the space character in a monospaced font is almost always larger than in a proportional font.

Use parameter (unnamed, as 2, or more explicitly as lang) to specify a language for mw:Extension:SyntaxHighlight. This option defaults to text, i.e. no highlighting. Valid values include wikitext for wikitext, html for HTML, along with many other languages including php, perl, css, javascript, mysql. Attempting to use an invalid value for lang will cause the page to be added to Category:Pages with syntax highlighting errors, and no syntax highlighting will be present in the output. html4strict and html5 used to be valid values - however, html should be used instead.

This template does not need to be substituted.

Included templates
Embedded templates do not function as expected inside code; for longer, free-form blocks of code, which can contain templates such as var and samp, use  as a wrapper instead of this template.

Templates used inside code expose the rendered HTML— this can be useful. For example:

The above example shows the HTML rendered by the citation template, including the hidden metadata.

Expensive Parser Function warning
This template internally uses mw:Extension:SyntaxHighlight, which is considered an 'expensive parser function' (see WP:EXPENSIVE). If used on a page which uses more than 500 expensive parser functions, the output of subsequent uses of this template will be presented using  formatting (without any syntax highlighting) instead.