Formatting
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C++ formatting options
The code formatter is used for changing the layout of your code: these are stylistic choices such as where you have newlines, where braces are located, how much and what is indented, and so forth.
Usually, this is done to match a particular coding standard, either a common one, your own personal, or a company one. C++Builder implements this through the clang-format tool.
Format code in the editor for selected code, a whole unit, or via a command-line tool. In-IDE is useful to format the code you are working on right now. The command-line tool is useful for automatic formatting when committing code, formatting your code in bulk, or similar operations.
In pages under C++, you can set options to be used in C++ projects for C/C++ source code files with the following extensions: *.cpp, *.cxx, *.cc, *.c, *.hpp, *.hxx, *.hh, *.h.
Formatting behavior
| Item | Description |
|---|---|
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Automatic formatting |
Format your code manually or automatically when you save or format on newline. Choose from:
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Format on new-line line limit |
If you choose to automatically format on a new line, the formatter will not be invoked and formatting will not be applied once if the code is longer than this number of lines. This is because clang-format can take a noticeable amount of time to format longer units. The default is set to 1000. |
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Formatting style |
Click the drop-down menu to show the list of predefined formatting styles: Custom formatting You can create clang-format presets that show in this setting just like the default Embarcadero, Mozilla, etc settings, or override format settings on a per-project basis. Per-project overrides The clang-format convention is for projects to specify their formatting style in a When no configuration file is found, the IDE uses the style defined by this setting as a fallback. This means that the IDE’s settings are used unless overridden on a per-project basis and that the IDE will respect per-project overrides using the convention of providing a New IDE-wide configuration You can create new configuration files storing formatter options and make them available to the IDE as a fallback for all projects. To do so, the file must:
This causes the name of the formatter to appear as an option in the ‘Formatting style’ setting. Edit or create files based on pre-existing configurations. For more information on how to write a configuration file, see Clang Format Style Options. Note: New files display in the Formatting style drop-down menu next time the IDE is started.
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Show Confirmation dialog |
When selected, the Confirmation prompting message appears when you run any formatting command. |
Preventing formatting
Prevent formatting on specific sections by surrounding code you do not want formatted with comments as follows:
// clang-format off Code here will not be formatted // clang-format on
Turning formatting off via a comment pauses formatting until the next 'on' comment is found. You can use comments in single line format (//) or multi-line (/**/) format.
Clang-format Command Line
You can invoke the formatter on the command line. It is called clang-format.exe. Clang-format provides no option to choose a formatting configuration file, and always looks for a local .clang-format file, so to use the Embarcadero formatting style you will need to copy Embarcadero.clang-format to your source folder, renaming it to .clang-format.