Jekyll Raw Code Block Syntax

One thing that I have really enjoyed since becoming a professional web developer is writing more and with this kind of job I find myself doing mostly technical writing and this involves generally writing blocks of code to show examples of my work.

This is a Jekyll site which uses Liquid. Sometimes I found that code blocks I had written as examples would end up being ran rather than being outputted as text code blocks. This is where the raw method becomes useful.

First of all to construct a code block using Jekyll you have to use the highlight method. You can use this for a variety of different languages (according to Jekyll they support over 60). You just have to place your language of choice after highlight.

{% highlight ruby %}
def cat
  puts 'I love cats'
end
{% endhighlight %}

This is all fine and dandy but remember I mentioned that sometimes the code will be ran. This can happen even within the highlight, so you need to use raw to escape it. Like this:

{% highlight ruby %}
{% raw %}
def cat
  puts 'I love cats'
end
{% endraw %}
{% endhighlight %}