Javascript syntax highlighter that plays nicely with Markdown

I've looked at a few Javascript programs to add syntax highlighting to code blocks on a page, but they all the ones I've found require setting an attribute on the code block to tell it what language is being used. I am generating the HTML with Markdown, so I have no way of setting these attributes, are there any that will do this automatically and will not need an attribute to 开发者_Python百科be set?

The only way I can think of this working is with a shebang line;

#!/usr/bin/ruby
def foo(bar)
    bar
end

And it will know it's Ruby, and maybe even not display the shebang line (having a shebang for a one or two line fragment will get tiring).

I wont be needing it to do any very obscure languages, but it would be great if I could easily write new definitions.

Thanks.

Google Prettifier should do the job. StackOverflow uses it, too (with the markup generated by Markdown). It determines the language automatically.

It's my understanding that the Markdown spec allows for the presence of actual markup as a fallback:

For any markup that is not covered by Markdown's syntax, you simply use HTML itself. There's no need to preface it or delimit it to indicate that you're switching from Markdown to HTML; you just use the tags.

The only restrictions are that block-level HTML elements -- e.g. <div>, <table>, <pre>, <p>, etc. -- must be separated from surrounding content by blank lines, and the start and end tags of the block should not be indented with tabs or spaces.

So, if you've got a syntax highlighter you really like that doesn't auto-detect, you could simply throw a literal <code> block with the appropriate attribute into your Markdown. I don't think it particularly violates the goals of Markdown, either... it's a fairly straightforward and readable indicator.

It also might not be that hard to roll your own script that executes first after the DOM is ready, finds code blocks, and inserts appropriate attributes for the syntax highlighter of your choice into them depending on a few heuristics that you devise for their contents, but if there's a library out there that already does it, obviously that has some advantages. :)