How can I patch `minted` to use `soul`s higlighting

Question

I'd like to highlight code with a gray background like StackExchange does. I know that I can set bgcolor in minted to put a solid background color on inline code.

However, this makes minted use colorbox which doesn't wrap across long lines like markdown does:

Here is a normal sentence that is short. here_is_a_very_long + code_snippet + that_ends_up + wrapped. The box does not extend into the right margin.

My understanding is that the soul package provides exactly this type of highlighting. My naive attempt to use it, building off the approach in https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/276750/41112, was something like:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{xpatch}
\usepackage{minted}
\usepackage{xcolor}
\usepackage{soul}

\definecolor{bg}{rgb}{0.95,0.95,0.95}
\setminted{breaklines=true}
\newmintinline[python]{python}{bgcolor=bg}

% this is the bit of code in question
\makeatletter
\xpatchcmd{\minted@inputpyg@inline}{%
  \colorbox%
}{%
  \long\def\color@b@x##1##2##3%
  {\sethlcolor{##2}\hl{##3}}%
  \colorbox%
}{\typeout{Success}}{\typeout{Failure}}
\makeatother

\begin{document}
Here is a normal sentence that is short.
\python{here_is_a_very_long + code_snippet + that_ends_up + wrapped}.
The box should not extend into the right margin.
\end{document}

Unfortunately, this appears to send LaTeX into an infinite loop; presumably because hl is using colorbox under the hood complains about a missing.

Does this approach look possible? Is there a way to restore the old meaning of \color@b@x inside its replacement, so that this recursion is avoided?

Unfortunately, this complains about an extra }. Does this approach look possible? What is going wrong here?

Answer 1

I don't think that it can work with soul, but with lualatex and lua-ul this seems to work (but be aware that code often can't break well over lines):

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{xpatch}
\usepackage{minted}
\usepackage{xcolor}
\definecolor{bg}{rgb}{0.95,0.95,0.95}
\usepackage{iftex}

\usepackage{luacolor}
\usepackage{lua-ul}

\setminted{breaklines=true}
\newmintinline[python]{python}{bgcolor=bg}

% this is the bit of code in question
\makeatletter
\newcommand\myhl[2]{\highLight[#1]{#2}}

\xpatchcmd{\minted@inputpyg@inline}{%
  \colorbox%
}{%
  \myhl%
}{\typeout{Success}}{\fail}
\makeatother

\begin{document}

Here is a normal sentence that is short.
\python{here_is_a_very_long + code_snippet + that_ends_up + wrapped}.
The box should not extend into the right margin.
\end{document}