Highlighting Text with Background Color

Question

I'm trying to highlight text using the \texttt font and a background color (pretty much like the highlighting on StackExchange [i.e., this]. I already tried it using a colorbox, it doesn't support line breaks though, resulting in:

Alternatively, I found a package called soul for highlighting, but in my opinion it's visually not as appealing as the colorbox because of the missing padding, it will look like this:

On the left is the colorbox, on the right is the soul package.

My coding:

\usepackage{color}
\usepackage{soul}

\definecolor{lightgrey}{rgb}{0.925, 0.925, 0.925}
\sethlcolor{lightgrey}

\newcommand{\codebox}[1]{\texttt{\colorbox{lightgrey}{#1}}}
\newcommand{\codebox2}[1]{\texttt{\hl{#1}}}

Any ideas how to overcome these caveats?

UPDATE: As mentioned in the comments below \texttt doesn't support line breaks as well which makes the problem even worse.

Answer 1

Soul doesn't support adjusting the sizes that determine the placement of its highlight box.

By looking at its code, I redefined one of its internal macros. I also used the trick from this answer.

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{color}
\usepackage{soul}
\usepackage{tikz} % only to get \foreach

\definecolor{lightgrey}{rgb}{0.925, 0.925, 0.925}
\sethlcolor{lightgrey}

\makeatletter
\def\SOUL@hlpreamble{%
    \setul{}{3.5ex}% increased by 1ex
    \let\SOUL@stcolor\SOUL@hlcolor
    \dimen@\SOUL@ulthickness
    \dimen@i=-.75ex % increased by -0.25ex
    \advance\[email protected]\dimen@
    \edef\SOUL@uldepth{\the\dimen@i}%
    \let\SOUL@ulcolor\SOUL@stcolor
    \SOUL@ulpreamble
}
\makeatother

\newcommand*{\codebox}[1]{{\ttfamily\hyphenchar\font=45\relax\hl{~#1~}}}

\begin{document}
    \foreach \i in {1,...,10} {
        text text text text text \codebox{extracalifragilisticexpealidocious}
    }
\end{document}

Note that this may break if the authors of soul change their packet's interna and that the large boxes change the line height.