I finally figured out what the problem was with Ultraviolet. If you get this error message:

   1  Textpow::ParsingError 
   2  (Parsing error in ^to \w+: wrong number of arguments (2 for 0)):

It is probably due to incompatibilities among some combination of your oniguruma C library, oniguruma, textpow, and ultraviolet gems, rubygems, and ruby the language itself.

Here’s my setup, running in Ubuntu, that works:

   1  jacqui@brighter~ $ ruby -v
   2  ruby 1.8.6 (2007-09-24 patchlevel 111) [x86_64-linux]
   3  jacqui@brighter~ $ gem -v
   4  1.0.1
   5  jacqui@brighter~ $ gem list # snippet
   6  oniguruma (1.1.0)
   7  textpow (0.10.0)
   8  ultraviolet (0.10.1)
   9  jacqui@brighter~ $ onig-config --version
  10  5.9.1

I’ll fix the overflow problem (related to code spilling out behind the sidebar) later.

I thought some syntax highlighting on the code I post in this blog would be nice. So, when I found the SimpleHighlight plugin for Simplelog I was happy - now I wouldn’t even have to write any CSS for it:)

It’s not that simple, apparently.

I thought I’d post this in the hopes that someone recognizes the error. I’ve googled and poked around in the code and as far as I can tell it’s due to an incompatibility between the gems (namely textpow) and the oniguruma gem/c library.

For what it’s worth, I ended up following along with these instructions in my attempt to get it all working; I still get the same error.

Rails trace (the top few lines at least):

   1  Textpow::ParsingError (Parsing error in ^to \w+: wrong number of arguments (2 for 0)):
   2      /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/textpow-0.10.0/lib/textpow/syntax.rb:92:in `initialize'
   3      /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/textpow-0.10.0/lib/textpow/syntax.rb:86:in `initialize'
   4      /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/textpow-0.10.0/lib/textpow/syntax.rb:75:in `load'
   5      /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/ultraviolet-0.10.1/lib/uv.rb:23:in `init_syntaxes'
   6      /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/ultraviolet-0.10.1/lib/uv.rb:22:in `init_syntaxes'
   7      /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/ultraviolet-0.10.1/lib/uv.rb:67:in `parse'
   8      /vendor/plugins/simple_highlight/lib/simple_highlight.rb:40:in `create_clean_content'
   9      /vendor/plugins/simple_highlight/lib/simple_highlight.rb:22:in `create_clean_content'
  10      /app/models/post.rb:247:in `before_validation_on_create'
  11      /app/models/post.rb:267:in `before_validation_on_update'

irb after reinstalling everything again:

   1  irb(main):011:0> puts Uv.parse( input, "xhtml", "html", true, "slush_poppies")
   2  /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/textpow-0.10.0/lib/textpow/syntax.rb:92:in `initialize': Parsing error in ^to \w+: wrong number of arguments (2 for 0) (Textpow::ParsingError)
   3     from /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/textpow-0.10.0/lib/textpow/syntax.rb:86:in `initialize'
   4     from /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/textpow-0.10.0/lib/textpow/syntax.rb:75:in `load'
   5      from /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/ultraviolet-0.10.1/lib/uv.rb:23:in `init_syntaxes'
   6     from /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/ultraviolet-0.10.1/lib/uv.rb:22:in `init_syntaxes'
   7     from /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/ultraviolet-0.10.1/lib/uv.rb:67:in `parse'