Import source code from URL

Question

I have code snippets on my github account and I'd like to import the code from them directly into my LaTeX document via something like:

\importtext{https://gist.github.com/xxxx}

Is this possible? I've searched everywhere but cannot find this.

Answer 1

LaTeX itself has no download or any other Internet functionality, so you can't import website etc. directly. You can however download the text and import it using \input{<localfile>} into your document. However, if it is source code you need to use a verbatim package like listings. With it you can use \lstinputlisting[<options>]{<filename>}. In the options you can also specify language=.. to get syntax highlighting.

In theory it would be possible to write an import macro which does this all for you, i.e. downloads the source code and includes it correctly, but I don't think someone programmed it yet. This would require to call external software from within LaTeX, which is only possible when the -shell-escape compiler option is used.

Answer 2

As Joseph mentioned, it's easy with ConTeXt. The macro \locfilename points to a local (cached) version of the web resource of the argument, which you can use as every other local file.

\locfilename {http://www.example.com/sometexfile.tex}

Since you want to print external text, you can make use of the ConTeXt vim module, which has this functionality built in. Use:

\usemodule [vim]
\definevimtyping [LATEX] [syntax=latex]

\starttext
\typeLATEXfile
    {https://raw.github.com/godbyk/tufte-latex/master/tufte-handout.cls}
\stoptext

This results in a page containing the source of the tufte-handout class. This mechanism work with several protocols, including https.

Note: URLs are sometimes nasty in TeX. When you run into problems with characters of the wrong catcode, you can use \asciimode, which turns everything except the backslash into a character.