How do I define a custom verbatim command?

Question

I'm not quite sure how to describe this, but I want to create a custom command that treats its input as verbatim and allows some control of the output.

In pseudocode, I want:

\newcommand{\code}[1]{\verb{!#1!}}
\newcommand{\samp}[1]{{\normalfont\textsl{\verb!#1!}}}

(But that obviously doesn't work)

newverbs gets me close to what I need, but e.g.

\RequirePackage{newverbs}
\newverbcommand{\code}{}{}

requires \code!~! rather than \code{~}

The main problem is that \verb can never be used in the argument to another command. — egreg, May 18 '13 at 20:57
There's no workaround. What's wrong in typing \verb|something| instead of \code|something|? Can you make some examples of usage of your command? Maybe there's a different way to accomplish the task. — egreg, May 18 '13 at 21:19
@egreg it's less semantic - e.g. in the future I might want to automatically syntax highlight code chunks. — hadley, May 18 '13 at 21:23
Well, \let\code\verb will do, of course. But with the same syntax as \verb and not as the argument of another command. In general newverbs is the way to go, if you want to change formatting. — egreg, May 18 '13 at 21:25
If you want a reason why it cannot work, see http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?label=verbwithin — kahen, May 19 '13 at 17:59
Probably, from the url package, you'll find the needed code but I'm not experienced enough to extract it from there: url.sty — Albert, Jun 06 '13 at 18:59
Does this answer your question? Can you interpret macro parameters as verbatim? — user202729, Dec 25 '21 at 09:39

score 5 · Answer 1 · answered May 19 '13 at 17:30

5

I prepared something using the listings package. You can adjust the appearance by customizing the \lstset and \lstdefinestyle commands. See the documentation for further information.

\documentclass{standalone}
\usepackage{xcolor}
\usepackage{listings}
\lstset{
    basicstyle=\color{red}\itshape
}
\lstdefinestyle{inline}{
    columns=fullflexible,
    breaklines=false
}
\newcommand{\code}[1]{\lstinline[style=inline]!#1!}
\begin{document}
Here is some \code{verbatim} text.
\end{document}

The output will looks something like this

Verbatim text using lstlisting

answered May 19 '13 at 17:30

Henri Menke

109,596

1

And how badly does this blow up if you do things like \code{1 != 0}? – kahen May 19 '13 at 18:00
1

Feel free to suggest a better delimiting character than ! – Henri Menke May 19 '13 at 18:20
1

Note that newer versions of listings also support \lstinline{#1} which would not need the character-marker !. Also, in case if anyone is interested, I wanted to have the style like \mathnormal. You can do that via basicstyle=\usefont{OML}{cmm}{m}{it}. – Albert Jun 07 '13 at 10:06

Steven B. Segletes · Answer 2 · 2013-06-06T19:28:38.873

2

This will give inline conversion of the argument to catcode 12 tokens, except for spaces and percents (%), which it still takes as ignore-the-rest-of-the-line-characters. Thus, it will wrap. But what it will not do is honor linefeeds in the argument. But as an inline command, you wouldn't want it to.

As Joseph Wright points out, unbalanced braces will also break this version.

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\def\fauxverb#1{\textsl{\detokenize{#1}}}
\begin{document}
This is \fauxverb{\verbatim} text.
\end{document}

enter image description here

edited Jun 06 '13 at 19:28

answered Jun 06 '13 at 19:01

Steven B. Segletes

237,551

1

Won't work with for example \fauxverb|%{| – Joseph Wright Jun 06 '13 at 19:03
1

Remark: \detokenize is documented in eTeX manual. -- See https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/150767/strange-behaviour-with-detokenize-and-underscore for why T1 fontenc is necessary. (also it's not necessary for other engines such as XeLaTeX) – user202729 Sep 07 '21 at 03:56

How do I define a custom verbatim command?

2 Answers2

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