Java Source Code Beautifier

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©1996-2012 Roedy Green, Canadian Mind Products

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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 {}?

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 feauture, 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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