I have a lot of different files that I want to display in highlighted form on a web page. These are different file types, ranging from Perl to config files to Java, etc. vim has an excellent syntax highlight engine, so it seems like a great choice to be able to do this kind of work. Has anyone tried to integrate vim within a Perl script?

Here are the possible options. First, one could parse the vim syntax files and try to write a parser for them in Perl (probably the best way to do that is to deconstruct the C source to vim). Second, one could figure out how to take the vim output of a file with the color-control characters and map them to whatever output method is needed (HTML, XML, terminal, etc.). Finally, perhaps there's some sort of method to plug into the engine directly (doubtful).

Anyone ever try this?