Creating a custom environment

Question

I'm using the following syntax for my code snippets

\begin{minipage}{\textwidth}
\begin{lstlisting}[caption=<something>, label=<something>]
The REST Endpoint URL 
   is http://api.flickr.com/services/rest/

To request the flickr.test.echo service, 
   invoke like this:
   http://api.flickr.com/services/rest/
      ?method=flickr.test.echo&name=value

By default, REST requests will send a REST response.
\end{lstlisting}
\end{minipage}

and I would like to have

\begin{code}[<caption>, <label>]
... code ...
\end{code}

which would behave exactly the same.

So I tried this thing but it won't compile and I can't spot the problem

\newenvironment{code}[2][]%
    {
        \minipage{\textwidth} 
        \lstset{
            basicstyle=\ttfamily,
            breaklines=true,
            captionpos=b,
            frame=bottomline,
            extendedchars=true
        }
        \begin{lstlisting}[caption=#1, label=#2]
    }
    {
        \end{lstlisting}
        \endminipage
    }

Error when running pdflatex

! Package inputenc Error: Unicode char \u8:�\expandafter not set up for use with LaTeX.

See the inputenc package documentation for explanation.
Type  H <return>  for immediate help.

Answer 1

You need to use \lstnewenvironment, provided by listings specifically for this purpose (see the listings documentation; section 4.16 Environments, p 40):

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{listings}% http://ctan.org/pkg/listings
\lstnewenvironment{code}[2][]%
  {%
    %\minipage{\textwidth} 
    \lstset{
      basicstyle=\ttfamily,
      breaklines=true,
      captionpos=b,
      frame=bottomline,
      extendedchars=true,
      caption=#1,
      label=#2
    }
  }
  {
    %\endminipage
  }
\begin{document}
\begin{code}[My code]{mycode}
  Here is some code
\end{code}

Here is some text. Also see Listing~\ref{morecode}.

\begin{code}[More code]{morecode}
  Here is some more code
\end{code}
\end{document}

No need for using a minipage of width \textwidth, unless you want to avoid breaking across pages.