Java Source Code Beautifier

Disclaimer

This essay does not describe an existing computer program, just one that should exist. This essay is about a suggested student project in Java programming. This essay gives a rough overview of how it might work. I have no source, object, specifications, file layouts or anything else useful to implementing this project. Everything I have prepared to help you is right here.

This project outline is not like the artificial, tidy little problems you are spoon-fed in school, when all the facts you need are included, nothing extraneous is mentioned, the answer is fully specified, along with hints to nudge you toward a single expected canonical solution. This project is much more like the real world of messy problems where it is up to you to fully the define the end point, or a series of ever more difficult versions of this project and research the information yourself to solve them.

Everything I have to say to help you with this project is written below. I am not prepared to help you implement it; or give you any additional materials. I have too many other projects of my own.

Though I am a programmer by profession, I don’t do people’s homework for them. That just robs them of an education.

You have my full permission to implement this project in any way you please and to keep all the profits from your endeavour.

Please do not email me about this project without reading the disclaimer above.

ANTLR

Another Tool for Language Recognition

You might do some additional tidyings:

Put attributes in a standard order, perhaps configurable, e. g. always order them private static final int .

Java has missing keywords. There is no unstatic when you want to explicitly mark a method or variable as instance. I suggest optionally inserting comment of the form /* instance */ to mark instance variables.

Similarly there is no way to explicitly mark a method as not private, not public, not protected. I suggesting adding the comment /* default */. We need a better name! Perhaps package, but that is already a keyword. Perhaps family or friend. Unfortunately friend has inaccurate connotations from C++.

There is no explicit unfinal keyword to mark each variable. I suggest introducing a variable declaration with a /* var */ comment. This would make it easy to scan for variable declarations with a text editor. Java’s syntax tends to camouflage them.

There is no easy way to scan in a text editor for the beginning of each method. There is no distinctive keyword to mark the beginning of each method the way there is in other languages. Insert a special /* method */ comment at the start of each method.

Collect together declarations and methods in the same order that Javadoc would put them, with the publics at the top, etc and optionally alphabetically within categories or sorted by type. It must be possible to turn this sorting feature off.

Consider marking every variable declaration with a lead in /* dcl */ comment, to make it easy to skip from declaration to declaration with a text editor.

Of course, you need a way to selectively remove all these extra comments as well.

Control spaces. Should there be spaces before/after ()? Perhaps you might want casts set off with space, but method calls not.

How do you like one-line if/else handled? With or without {}?

SCID

You might tackle just a small subset of the problem, e.g. converting braces between same-line K&E style and line-by-themselves style. After you succeed, you might add another feature, then another.

See parser for tools to help you analyse the source. Ideally this tool would be integrated with a CVS (Concurrent Versions System) front end to automatically beautify any source before it went into the repository. You have to be careful with reordering though. Code must be retested after a reordering since reordering can break static init code.

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This page is posted
on the web at:

http://mindprod.com/project/javabeautifier.html

Optional Replicator mirror
of mindprod.com
on local hard disk J:

J:\mindprod\project\javabeautifier.html

Please read the feedback from other visitors, or send your own feedback about the site.
Contact Roedy. Please feel free to link to this page without explicit permission.

Canadian Mind Products
IP:[65.110.21.43]
Your face IP:[3.17.6.75]

Feedback

You are visitor number