Best way to format source generated code?

[thomhurst]

What's the recommendation on nicely formatting generated code?

At the moment I'm just using a string builder and trying to handle it manually but with line breaks and tabs it gets difficult if the code becomes nested.

I know you can parse a syntax tree and call normalize whitespace, but is that going to dramatically slow down my source generator? I don't want a laggy experience for users.

Thanks

[CyrusNajmabadi]

Best way is to just emit in a properly formatted fashion to begin with. Just use a string building abstraction that supports indentation. Indent when you enter a block, and dedent when you leave.

[thomhurst]

Yeah that's what I've been doing but appending multi line strings loses the indentation. I'll just have to append a line at a time I guess

[CyrusNajmabadi]

Yeah that's what I've been doing but appending multi line strings loses the indentation.

Update your builder to support that concept. I have one that just breaks up the input into constituent lines and appends them all, each with the appropriate indentation.

[thomhurst]

Will splitting the string result in unnecessary allocations and slow things down though?

[CyrusNajmabadi]

you don't have to literally split into strings. for exampe, you can just use ROS<char> to represent the lines.

[Pentadome]

When I played with source generators, I used the csharpier api to format the code.