Template:Var/doc

Usage

This template is to help facilitate the displaying of variable names (in mathematics, computer source code, wikimarkup in template documentation, metasyntactic variables, etc.) with the semantically correct <var>...</var> tags, which also renders the variable in italics, as is customary. This method is preferred to simply italicizing for many reasons, including accessibility, separation of presentation and content, semantic Web, and metadata; In XHTML and HTML, the <var> element has semantic meaning, while simple italicization does not. This template provides a tiny hint of kerning to compensate for the italicization and enhance readability.

"Variable" in this sense may include arbitrary or unknown names or terms, examples of human input, arithmetical variables in equations, etc. This template (and the underlying XHTML) are generally not used if MediaWiki's <math>...</math> tags (or any other stand-alone mathematical markup) are being used.

Examples

Example

Template:Block indent

outputs the following HTML:

Template:Block indent

which renders as:

Template:Block indent

Note that on the screen or in print, this renders as simple italicization, as does

Usage

Wraps a short span of text in <syntaxhighlight> tags (see mw:Extension:SyntaxHighlight). This template should be used for short samples; longer content should use <pre>...</pre> or <syntaxhighlight>...</syntaxhighlight>. See Help:Wiki markup for an explanation of what the various tags do.

If the content includes an equals sign (=), you must specify the parameter explicitly: {{code|1=date=30 Feb 2010}}.

The template uses the <syntaxhighlight> tag with the attribute inline=1. This works like the combination of the <code> and <nowiki> tags, applied to the expanded wikitext. For example, {{code|some '''wiki''' text}} will not render the word "wiki" in bold, and will render the tripled-single-quotes:

However, {{code|a {{template}} call}} will still invoke the template:

Use <nowiki>...</nowiki> around the template name to avoid this problem:

When used inline with regular text, {{code}} generally looks best and is easiest to read when it is explicitly spaced apart from the regular text:

is well spaced:

foo    quux.

versus:

which is going to be visually confusing for many:

foo quux.

because "foo" and "" will seem more closely associated than "" and ""; the width of the space character in a monospaced font is almost always larger than in a proportional font.

Use parameter {{{2}}} (unnamed, as |2=, or more explicitly as |lang=) to specify a language for mw:Extension:SyntaxHighlight. This option defaults to plain-text, i.e. no highlighting. There is no highlighting option for wikitext as a markup language, though and are valid values, as are , , , , and many others. Attempting to use an invalid one causes a list of valid ones to be displayed in place of the template output, when the page is previewed or saved.

This template does not need to be substituted.

Examples

Markup	Renders as

Included templates

Embedded templates do not function as expected inside {{code}}; for longer, free-form blocks of code, which can contain templates such as {{var}} and {{samp}}, use <code>...</code> as a wrapper instead of this template.

Templates used inside {{code}} expose the rendered HTML— this can be useful. For example:

Markup	Renders as

The above example shows the HTML rendered by the citation template, including the hidden metadata.

TemplateData

This is the TemplateData for this template used by TemplateWizard, VisualEditor and other tools. Click here to see a monthly parameter usage report for this template based on this TemplateData.

TemplateData for Var

See also

• {{codett}}, wrapper for this template that removes background and border styling
• {{mono}}, monospaced font only
• {{param value}}, monospaced; friendly handling for blank space
• {{Syntaxhighlight}}
• {{kbd}}, for keyboard input
• Help:Wiki markup

(using pairs of apostrophes) or <i>username</i> (using HTML), yet it carries more semantic meaning than either of these methods.

At times, you may wish to use a serif font. This is especially true when attempting to render single-letter variables like "I" (upper-case "i") and "l" (lower-case "L"), since they are nearly indistinguishable (if at all). In such situations, use the {{varserif}} template instead of {{var}}, to make them more distinguishable, like these serif examples: I, l.

More examples

Markup	Renders as

TemplateData

This is the TemplateData for this template used by TemplateWizard, VisualEditor and other tools. Click here to see a monthly parameter usage report for this template based on this TemplateData.

TemplateData for Var

Marks text as an HTML variable

Template parameters

Parameter		Description	Type	Status
variable	1	no description	Line	required
class	class	no description	String	optional
ID	id	no description	String	optional
CSS style	style	no description	String	optional
language	lang	no description Example c++	String	optional
HTML title (hovertext)	title	no description	String	optional

See also

• {{mvar}} which makes the argument italic and formats as mathematics
• {{math}} which formats its argument as mathematics
• {{bigmath}}, the same as {{math}} but makes it bigger