Whenever I have to edit Perl Mason files, I always have problems indenting lines due to Perl code starting with %. For example:
<div>
<div>
% if( !$something ) {
<strong><% $title %></strong>
% }
</div>
</div>
Any idea how I can tell Vim to ignore the % at the beginning of the line and indent like it wasn't there?
I'm using https://github.com/aming/vim-mason to support the mixed Perl/HTLM syntax, but I don't think it changes anything.
This is Perl code embedded inside HTML, so the indenting comes from $VIMRUNTIME/indent/html.vim. This defines an 'indentexpr', implemented by HtmlIndent().
You need to modify that implementation to ignore % in the first column; whenever it accesses the buffer (getline(), prevnonblank(), shiftwidth()), you need to intercept, find the previous line that does have such % sigil, and return the value for that instead. (If those special lines can also contain HTML tags, you may have to extract those from the Perl code and return only those.) That gets you the indenting you desire.
Unfortunately, it's not trivial, and you have to fork the original implementation. However, if you manage to implement a clean solution, you could suggest adding integration points to the author of indent/html.vim. If there are other languages apart from Mason that use these prefixes on top of HTML, that would be an additional argument for adding such support (and maybe even your wrapper functions).
I'm trying to figure out how to modify an XML file with NSIS. So I'm trying to learn how to use the XML plugin. The examples on the forum page often use the format ${plugin::command} like:
${xml::LoadFile}
The documentation gives no indication that you need the dollar sign and curly braces. As I understand it, just plugin::command will do. So I've been trying to figure out what that syntax means.
The documentation says a $ is for variables and the {} are for code blocks, but I can't find anything about what it means when they're used together. My Internet searches have revealed that it's used for something called template literals in JavaScript. But what does it mean in NSIS?
EDIT: I should mention that the NSIS documentation does show examples of this syntax, especially in the Predefines section, but it still doesn't explain what the syntax means in general.
EDIT: Okay, now I see that the syntax is for the compiler to replace things using !define and !macro. But... what about this specific case? Is it valid to use colons in such a symbol? Why are some people writing ${xml::LoadFile}and some people just writing xml::LoadFile?
It's a !define. There is a header file for this plugin that defines it. The plugin probably needs to do more than one thing, so they wrapped a few lines together with a define that inserts a macro. Either that or it has some default parameters for the plugin call. Either way, it's trying to save you some typing with this syntax.
I have some PowerShell cmdlets for which I've created in-code documentation. All works fine except for one thing. If I have a long description for any of the documentation sections I'm splitting it into multiple lines so that it can be easily read from code. However I've noticed that those new line characters are then also represented as new lines in the PowerShell system.
As an example, here's part of the documentation
.PARAMETER MyParam
This parameter has a long documentation that does not fit into single line,
so I'm breaking it down to several lines.
Now once I run Get-Help on a cmdlet that contains this sort of comments I'll get something like.
-MyParam [<SwitchParameter>]
This parameter has a long documentation that does not fit
into single line,
so I'm breaking it down to several lines.
Required? true
Position? named
Default value False
Accept pipeline input? false
Accept wildcard characters? false
Notice that the first line gets wrapped correctly, but then the second line (starting with the word so) also starts on a new line.
I could overcome this problem by putting my whole documentation block in one line but that wouldn't be too good for readability point of view.
Is there a way to treat the whole documentation block as it was part of the same text block but have the comments organized into multiple lines at the same time? Any way that I could tell in the documentation that I don't intend to make a new paragraph and I want to continue previous one?
I don't think this is possible apart from preprocessing help strings with external script.
Use word-wrap in your editor and keep everything on the one line. Keep a hotkey accessible for WW so you can quickly switch from one line to block of text when you need to edit it. Some editors (such as vim) are extremely good in navigating wrapped text (basically the same as it is not wrapped).
In MATLAB, how do you tell where in the code a variable is getting output?
I have about 10K lines of MATLAB code with about 4 people working on it. Somewhere, someone has dumped a variable in a MATLAB script in the typical way:
foo
Unfortunately, I do not know what variable is getting output. And the output is cluttering out other more important outputs.
Any ideas?
p.s. Anyone ever try overwriting Standard.out? Since MATLAB and Java integration is so tight, would that work? A trick I've used in Java when faced with this problem is to replace Standard.out with my own version.
Ooh, I hate this too. I wish Matlab had a "dbstop if display" to stop on exactly this.
The mlint traversal from weiyin is a good idea. Mlint can't see dynamic code, though, such as arguments to eval() or string-valued figure handle callbacks. I've run in to output like this in callbacks like this, where update_table() returns something in some conditions.
uicontrol('Style','pushbutton', 'Callback','update_table')
You can "duck-punch" a method in to built-in types to give you a hook for dbstop. In a directory on your Matlab path, create a new directory named "#double", and make a #double/display.m file like this.
function display(varargin)
builtin('display', varargin{:});
Then you can do
dbstop in double/display at 2
and run your code. Now you'll be dropped in to the debugger whenever display is implicitly called by the omitted semicolon, including from dynamic code. Doing it for #double seems to cover char and cells as well. If it's a different type being displayed, you may have to experiment.
You could probably override the built-in disp() the same way. I think this would be analagous to a custom replacement for Java's System.out stream.
Needless to say, adding methods to built-in types is nonstandard, unsupported, very error-prone, and something to be very wary of outside a debugging session.
This is a typical pattern that mLint will help you find:
So, look on the right hand side of the editor for the orange lines. This will help you find not only this optimization, but many, many more. Notice also that your variable name is highlighted.
If you have a line such as:
foo = 2
and there is no ";" on the end, then the output will be dumped to the screen with the variable name appearing first:
foo =
2
In this case, you should search the file for the string "foo =" and find the line missing a ";".
If you are seeing output with no variable name appearing, then the output is probably being dumped to the screen using either the DISP or FPRINTF function. Searching the file for "disp" or "fprintf" should help you find where the data is being displayed.
If you are seeing output with the variable name "ans" appearing, this is a case when a computation is being done, not being put in a variable, and is missing a ';' at the end of the line, such as:
size(foo)
In general, this is a bad practice for displaying what's going on in the code, since (as you have found out) it can be hard to find where these have been placed in a large piece of code. In this case, the easiest way to find the offending line is to use MLINT, as other answers have suggested.
I like the idea of "dbstop if display", however this is not a dbstop option that i know of.
If all else fails, there is still hope. Mlint is a good idea, but if there are many thousands of lines and many functions, then you may never find the offender. Worse, if this code has been sloppily written, there will be zillions of mlint flags that appear. How will you narrow it down?
A solution is to display your way there. I would overload the display function. Only temporarily, but this will work. If the output is being dumped to the command line as
ans =
stuff
or as
foo =
stuff
Then it has been written out with display. If it is coming out as just
stuff
then disp is the culprit. Why does it matter? Overload the offender. Create a new directory in some directory that is on top of your MATLAB search path, called #double (assuming that the output is a double variable. If it is character, then you will need an #char directory.) Do NOT put the #double directory itself on the MATLAB search path, just put it in some directory that is on your path.
Inside this directory, put a new m-file called disp.m or display.m, depending upon your determination of what has done the command line output. The contents of the m-file will be a call to the function builtin, which will allow you to then call the builtin version of disp or display on the input.
Now, set a debugging point inside the new function. Every time output is generated to the screen, this function will be called. If there are multiple events, you may need to use the debugger to allow processing to proceed until the offender has been trapped. Eventually, this process will trap the offensive line. Remember, you are in the debugger! Use the debugger to determine which function called disp, and where. You can step out of disp or display, or just look at the contents of dbstack to see what has happened.
When all is done and the problem repaired, delete this extra directory, and the disp/display function you put in it.
You could run mlint as a function and interpret the results.
>> I = mlint('filename','-struct');
>> isErrorMessage = arrayfun(#(S)strcmp(S.message,...
'Terminate statement with semicolon to suppress output (in functions).'),I);
>>I(isErrorMessage ).line
This will only find missing semicolons in that single file. So this would have to be run on a list of files (functions) that are called from some main function.
If you wanted to find calls to disp() or fprintf() you would need to read in the text of the file and use regular expresions to find the calls.
Note: If you are using a script instead of a function you will need to change the above message to read: 'Terminate statement with semicolon to suppress output (in scripts).'
Andrew Janke's overloading is a very useful tip
the only other thing is instead of using dbstop I find the following works better, for the simple reason that putting a stop in display.m will cause execution to pause, every time display.m is called, even if nothing is written.
This way, the stop will only be triggered when display is called to write a non null string, and you won't have to step through a potentially very large number of useless display calls
function display(varargin)
builtin('display', varargin{:});
if isempty(varargin{1})==0
keyboard
end
A foolproof way of locating such things is to iteratively step through the code in the debugger observing the output. This would proceed as follows:
Add a break point at the first line of the highest level script/function which produces the undesired output. Run the function/script.
step over the lines (not stepping in) until you see the undesired output.
When you find the line/function which produces the output, either fix it, if it's in this file, or open the subfunction/script which is producing the output. Remove the break point from the higher level function, and put a break point in the first line of the lower-level function. Repeat from step 1 until the line producing the output is located.
Although a pain, you will find the line relatively quickly this way unless you have huge functions/scripts, which is bad practice anyway. If the scripts are like this you could use a sort of partitioning approach to locate the line in the function in a similar manner. This would involve putting a break point at the start, then one half way though and noting which half of the function produces the output, then halving again and so on until the line is located.
I had this problem with much smaller code and it's a bugger, so even though the OP found their solution, I'll post a small cheat I learned.
1) In the Matlab command prompt, turn on 'more'.
more on
2) Resize the prompt-y/terminal-y part of the window to a mere line of text in height.
3) Run the code. It will stop wherever it needed to print, as there isn't the space to print it ( more is blocking on a [space] or [down] press ).
4) Press [ctrl]-[C] to kill your program at the spot where it couldn't print.
5) Return your prompt-y area to normal size. Starting at the top of trace, click on the clickable bits in the red text. These are your potential culprits. (Of course, you may need to have pressed [down], etc, to pass parts where the code was actually intended to print things.)
You'll need to traverse all your m-files (probably using a recursive function, or unix('find -type f -iname *.m') ). Call mlint on each filename:
r = mlint(filename);
r will be a (possibly empty) structure with a message field. Look for the message that starts with "Terminate statement with semicolon to suppress output".
I'm looking for a way to generate and insert header comment blocks above my functions in Emacs (in any mode), with the default contents of the comment automatically based on the function's signature (i.e. the correct number of #param place-holders).
Doxymacs is a nice candidate. But I prefer another way works without the necessary libs. Can anyone recommend some others ways for adding smart comments for functions in Emacs? Thanks.
Edit:
Now I found this: http://nschum.de/src/emacs/doc-mode/, but it seems that it does not work well after I require it into my .emacs and add hook for js-mode. Doesn't it support js functions ?
I don't know of any general-purpose approach.
Csharp-mode has a defun that is bound to / , which tries to generate comments appropriate for C#. The way it works: Every time you type a slash, it looks to see if it is the third slash in a row. (In C#, three slashes are used to denote comments that produce documentation). If it is the third slash, then it looks at the surrounding text and inserts a comment skeleton or fragment that is appropriate.
It is not generalized in any way to support javascript or other language syntaxes. But you might be able to build what you want, if you start with that.
here's the excerpt:
http://pastebin.com/ATCustgi
I've used doxymacs in the past and I've found it useful
http://doxymacs.sourceforge.net/