General developer forum

Preparing a patch for Moodle, I came across the issue of ensuring no tabs had sliped into my code. If you are wondering why this matters, check out the Coding Style, halfway down http://moodle.org/doc/?file=coding.html

Unfortunately, grepping for tabs isn't that easy. Here's a handy trick to do it:

  # create a file with a tab
  $ perl -e 'print "\t" ' > tab

  # create two test files
  $ perl -e 'print "foo\tbar" ' > test_with_tab
  $ echo 'foo bar'              > test_no_tab

  # test the trick: grep using the file as reference
  $ grep -f tab test*
  # (this should find a tab only in test_with_tab_)

now check the moodle tree for tabs,
just in case you've put one in there...

  # this grep will skip binary files (GIFs have tab characters)
  # and give you a count of how many tabs are found in each file
  # the 2nd grep skips clean files from the report.
  $ grep -f tab -rcI * | grep -v ':0' 

Ok, so that was the good news.

The bad news? Moodle CVS (both HEAD and MOODLE_14_STABLE) have heaps of tab characters in the code.

Martin, is there a cleanup policy? We can always do something along the lines of

  $ grep -f tab -rlI * | xargs perl -pi -e 's/\t/    /g'
  # check all is good, diff -w should come out clean
  $ cvs diff -w

cheers,





martin