title: Fenced Code Blocks Extension prev_title: Definition Lists Extension prev_url: definition_lists.html next_title: Footnotes Extension next_url: footnotes.html Fenced Code Blocks ================== Summary ------- The Fenced Code Blocks extension adds a secondary way to define code blocks, which overcomes a few limitations of the indented code blocks. This extension is included in the standard Markdown library. Syntax ------ Fenced Code Blocks are defined using the syntax established in [PHP Markdown Extra][php]. [php]: http://www.michelf.com/projects/php-markdown/extra/#fenced-code-blocks Thus, the following text (taken from the above referenced PHP documentation): This is a paragraph introducing: ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ a one-line code block ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Fenced code blocks can have a blank line as the first and/or last line of a code block and they can also come immediately after a list item without becoming part of the list. ### Language ### In addition to PHP Extra's syntax, you can define the language of the code block for use by syntax highlighters etc. The language will be assigned as a class attribute of the ```` element in the output. Therefore, you should define the language as you would a css class - ``.language``. For consistency with other markdown syntax, the language can *optionally* be wrapped in curly brackets: ~~~~{.python} # python code ~~~~ ~~~~.html

HTML Document

~~~~ The above will output:
# python code
    
<p>HTML Document</p>
    
[Github][]'s backtick (`\``) syntax is also supported: ```python # more python code ``` [Github]: http://github.github.com/github-flavored-markdown/ ### Emphasized Lines ### If you would like to have your fenced code blocks highlighted with the [CodeHilite][] extension, simply enable that extension (remember that [Pygments][] is its dependency) and the language of your fenced code blocks will be passed in and highlighted appropriately. Similar to the [colon][] syntax of the CodeHilite extension, fenced code blocks can also have emphasized certain lines of code. The lines can be specified with PHP Extra's syntax: ~~~~{.python hl_lines="1 3"} # This line is emphasized # This line isn't # This line is emphasized ~~~~ ... or with GitHub's: ```python hl_lines="1 3" # This line is emphasized # This line isn't # This line is emphasized ``` [CodeHilite]: code_hilite.html [Pygments]: http://pygments.org/ [colon]: code_hilite.html#colons Usage ----- See [Extensions](index.html) for general extension usage, specify `fenced_code` as the name of the extension. This extension does not accept any special configuration options.