---
title: Testing Highlighting
---

A common task when writing plugin tests is testing various kinds of highlighting (inspections, annotators, parser error highlighting etc.)
The IntelliJ Platform provides a dedicated utility and markup format for this task.

To test the highlighting for the file currently loaded into the in-memory editor, you invoke the ```checkHighlighting()``` method.
The parameters to the method specify which severities should be taken into account when comparing the results with the expected results: errors are always taken into account, whereas warnings, weak warnings and infos are optional.
Alternatively, you can use the ```testHighlighting()``` method, which loads a testdata file into the in-memory editor and highlights it as a single operation.

If you need to test inspections (rather than generic highlighting provided by a highlighting lexer or annotator), you need to enable inspections that you're testing.
This is done by calling ```CodeInsightTestFixture.enableInspections()``` in the setup method of your test or directly in a test method, before the call to checkHighlighting().

The expected results of the highlighting are specified directly in the source file.
The platform supports an extensive XML-like markup language for this. In its simplest form, the markup looks like this:

```xml
<warning descr="expected error message">code to be highlighted</warning>
```

Or, as a more specific example:

```xml
public int <warning descr="The compareTo() method does not reference 'foo' which is referenced from equals(); inconsistency may result">compareTo</warning>(Simple other) {
    return 0;
}
```

The tag name specifies the severity of the expected highlighting.
The following severities are supported:

*  ```<error>```

*  ```<warning>```

*  ```<weak_warning>```

*  ```<info>```

*  ```<inject>``` (for an injected fragment)

*  ```<symbolName>``` (for a marker that highlights an identifier according to its type)

*  any custom severity can be referenced by its name


The tag can also have the following optional attributes:

*  ```descr``` expected message associated with the highlighter (if not specified, any text will match; if the message contains a quotation mark, it can be escaped by putting two backslash characters before it)

*  ```foregroundColor```, ```backgroundColor```, ```effectColor``` expected colors for the highlighting

*  ```effectType``` expected effect type for the highlighting (see ```EffectType``` enum for possible values)

*  ```fontType``` expected font style for the highlighting (0 - normal, 1 - bold, 2 - italic, 3 - bold italic)