define several languages for code snippets

Question

After consulting this link: https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/LaTeX/Source_Code_Listings in order to write some code, I concluded to this:

\lstset{ 
language=C, 
backgroundcolor=\color{highlight}, 
blah, blah, blah
}

\newcommand{\insertcode}[2]{\begin{itemize}\item[]\lstinputlisting[caption=#2,label=#1]{#1}\end{itemize}} 

Finally, I didn't use the newcommand, instead I used \lstinputlisting{my_file.c} and it worked fine.

(The file above is included int the main.tex file)

Now I want to add a second language, would that be something like

\lstset{ 
language=python, 
backgroundcolor=\color{highlight}, 
blah, blah, blah
}

Should that be included in a different file? Should I create a new command in the same file? Is so, what would that be? In either case, could someone provide an example of the newcommand structure?

Any thoughts would be appreciated.

Answer 1

There's no need to have separate \lstset commands for each language if all of your basic formatting for code snippets is the same.

Use \lstset to set the basic parameters of the code formatting, and then in your \lstinputlisting command you can just pas the language as a parameter:

\lstinputlisting[language=C]{file.c}
\lstinputlisting[language=python]{file.py}

If you do want to have different styles for different languages, you can do so using the \lstdefinestyle command. Here's an example of different styles used for LaTeX and Ruby:

\documentclass{article}
\begin{filecontents}{hello.rb}
class Hello
   def initialize(name)
      @name = name.capitalize
   end
   def sayHi
      puts "Hello #{@name}!"
   end
end

hello = Hello.new("world")
hello.sayHi
\end{filecontents}
\begin{filecontents*}{hello.tex}
\documentclass{article}
\begin{document}
Hello World!
\end{document}
\end{filecontents*}
\usepackage{listings}
\usepackage{xcolor}
\lstset{%
    basicstyle=\ttfamily\small,
    commentstyle=\itshape\ttfamily\small,
    showspaces=false,
    showstringspaces=false,
    breaklines=true,
    breakautoindent=true,
    captionpos=t
}
\lstdefinestyle{TeX}{language=[LaTeX]TeX, frame=none,texcsstyle=*\color{blue}}
\lstdefinestyle{ruby}{language=Ruby, frame=leftline,keywordstyle=\color{red},numbers=left}
\begin{document}
\section{Sample LaTeX document}
\lstinputlisting[style=TeX]{hello.tex}

\section{Sample Ruby document}
\lstinputlisting[style=ruby]{hello.rb}
\end{document}