How to format user defined language code?

Moutaz Bakier · Nov 26, 2021, 7:52 PM

We have the following codes:

<head>
create object
{
code_text

width 128
	height 128
 color red
}
create object
{
 width 128
height 128
		color red
}

The user-defined language should be formatted as follows:

<head>
	create object1
	{
		width 128
		height 128
		color red
	}
	create object2
	{
		width 128
		height 128
		color red
	}

Can this be done?

PeterJones · Nov 27, 2021, 5:48 PM

@moutaz-bakier ,

User Defined Languages are just about syntax highlighting (adding color to keywords) – not about re-formatting your text for you.

If I were trying to reformat a file with structure as simple as you’ve shown, I would just use a few search/replace pairs, all with Search Mode = Regular Expression enabled:

FIND = ^\h*(?={|}|create)
REPLACE = \t
FIND = ^\h*(?=width|height|color)
REPLACE = \t\t

Those will change lines that start with any whitespace followed by { or } or create to start with a single tab; and lines that start with any whitespace followed by width or height or color into two tabs before the word. If, instead of tabs, you want 4 spaces or 8 spaces per tab, use four spaces or eight spaces in the first replace, and 8 or 16 spaces in the second replace.

If the structure is the same, but there are more keywords that are always indented to a certain level, just add them as |keyword|another in the list of |-separated terms above. OTOH, if you actually have more complicated nesting with extra levels of { ... } or similar, and the ability for the same keywords to be at different levels depending on how deeply it’s nested, then the simplistic regex I supplied will not be enough.

Many languages come with a “pretty print” or “tidy” utility, which allows you to pipe source code through that utility and it will come out with consistent formatting; using the NppExec plugin, you can pipe the active file through that re-formatting utility. @Michael-Vincent showns an example in this linked post of a script that will look at the file extension, and run it through one of many code reformatters, depending on language.