C-C++ Beautifier HOW-TO
alavoor[AT?yahoo.comv16.0, 27 April 2002
This document will help you to format (beautify) the C/C++ programs so that it is more readable and confirms to your site C/C++ coding standards. The information in this document applies to all the operating sytems that is - Linux, MS DOS, Apple Macintosh, Windows 95/NT/2000, BeOS, OS/2, IBM OSes, all flavors of Unix like Solaris, HPUX, AIX, SCO, Sinix, BSD, !UnixWare?, etc.. and to all other operating systems which support "C" compiler (it means almost all the operating systems on this planet!).
(The latest version of this document is at
http://www.milkywaygalaxy.freeservers.com. You may
want to check there for changes).
Coding standards for C/C++ or any language is required in order to make the programs more readable/understandable by programmers. There are C/C++ beautifiers (formating tools) to accomplish this goal. Formatted (beautified) code improves the productivity of programmers by 2 times!!
On Linux/Unixes there is a command called "indent" and "cb" . Refer to 'man indent' and 'man cb'. Note that indent and cb work for only "C" programs. For "C++" programs use "bcpp".
Important NOTE: To compile bcpp under unix, unpack bcpp.tar.gz and you MUST change directory to "code" and give a make. Do not change to "unix" directory and give a make. That will give lots of errors.
Download the beautifier program from one of the following
then download for a small cost from my
site at
http://www.milkywaygalaxy.freeservers.com.
The cost is very small to maintain this web site.
Some of the free sites below are not maintained properly.
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http://dickey.his.com/bcpp/bcpp.html
or at
http://www.clark.net/pub/dickey.
BCPP ftp site is at
ftp://dickey.his.com/bcpp/bcpp.tar.gz
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http://www.consultix-inc.com/c++b.html
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http://www.chips.navy.mil/oasys/c/
and mirror at
Oasys
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http://www.semdesigns.com/Products/DMS/DMSToolkit.html
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http://www.geocities.com/starkville/main.html
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http://users.erols.com/astronaut/vim/ccb-1.07.tar.gz
and site at
http://users.erols.com/astronaut/vim/#vimlinks_src
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http://www.prismtk.de/docs/cbp
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Windows 95/98/NT/2000
http://perso.club-internet.fr/cbeaudet
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http://www.geocities.com/starkville/main.html
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http://sourceforge.net/projects/astyle
http://astyle.sourceforge.net.
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I used BCPP to format the C++ programs and it worked fine for me. You may want to check other tools and use the one which you may like the most.
BCPP was written by Steven De Toni at
For 100% assurance you need a SCIENTIFIC way to validate and trust a beautifier program. The method described in this section will enable the beautifier program to be accepted as "trust-worthy" and reliable.
In order to verify that beautifier programs like bcpp, indent or cb is not damaging or changing the input source-code after formatting, you can use one of the following technique -
Generate the object code from the original input source code using the compiler -
g++ -c myprogram.cpp
Here g++ is GNU C++ compiler. This will create object output myprogram.o
Save this file -
mv myprogram.o myprogram_orig.o
Now run bcpp -
bcpp myprogram.cpp
This will create the formatted output program file myprogram.cpp and move the original file to myprogram.cpp.orig. Compile the new file with -
g++ -c myprogram.cpp
Now use the unix 'diff' command to compare the two object files -
diff myprogram.o myprogram_orig.o
Both these files MUST BE IDENTICAL. This verifies that bcpp is working perfectly. On DOS or Windows 95 you may want to use the free Cygnus Cygwin 'diff' or 'MKS' utilities.
If for some reason you are not able to diff the object files then you MUST use the assembly output as described below.
You can use the assembler output instead of object output from the C++ compiler for doing the comparison. Like -
g++ -S myprogram.cpp
This creates myprogram.s. Verify with -
diff myprogram.s myprogram_orig.s
This step gives 100% guarantee that your valuable source code is intact and bcpp is JUST doing ONLY formatting and is NOT changing or damaging your code in any way. This method gives you 100% quality assurance and life term or long term WARRANTY on beautifier programs like 'bcpp', 'cb' or 'indent'.
It is strongly recommended that you do these two steps every time you run beautifier programs like bcpp, indent or cb.
Since you cannot compile the Java source code to machine code and you can compile Java source to byte-codes you cannot use the technique given in Method 1 above. When you do diff on Java class files it will always be different.
In this method, a different technique will be given which can be used to validate any beautifier program for Java. Also this method is quite powerful and can be used to validate any beautifier program for any language like C, C++, PERL, SQL, HTML or Java. Since all beautifier program simply rearrange or insert whitespaces , you can strip all the whitespaces from original source file and dump it to a file called verify1.out and strip all the whitespaces from beautified source file and dump it to a file called verify2.out. Now, do a diff on verify1.out and verify2.out. If there is no difference, then beautifier program is working properly. The method is not 100% perfect and can catch atleast 98% of the errors/bugs in the beautifier program. Use this method in conjunction with other methods. But this method is better than not having a verification at all and blindly trusting the beautifier program!!
Note: A whitespace can be one of following - blank space ' ', form-feed '\f', newline '\n', carriage return '\r', horizontal tab '\t' or vertical tab '\v'.
bash$ java !StripWhitespaces? sample.java > verify1.out bash$ java !StripWhitespaces? sample_beutified.java > verify2.out bash$ diff verify1.out verify2.out bash$ java !StripWhitespaces? sample.cpp > verify1.out bash$ java !StripWhitespaces? sample_beutified.cpp > verify2.out bash$ diff verify1.out verify2.out bash$ java !StripWhitespaces? sample.sql > verify1.out bash$ java !StripWhitespaces? sample_beutified.sql > verify2.out bash$ diff verify1.out verify2.out
The source code of !StripWhitespaces? Java program is not given here. It is left as an exercise for students (you) to write a small program in Java which will simply strip whitespaces from the input text file and output to standard console output. Students are also urged to write this small program (!StripWhitespaces?) in C, PERL, Unix shell script (Korn, Bourne) and AWK script. Students can see howto the same task can be accomplished in these five different languages and can do comparison of ease of programing. You should put a newline '\n' character after every 50 characters while generating verify1.out and verify2.out so that when you do a diff you can see on which lines differences are coming up. Otherwise, verify*.out files will just contain one line and it will be difficult to pin-point where exactly the beautifier program is failing (got this point ???).
This is a Korn shell script to verify beautifier program. Requires "pdksh*.rpm" from Linux 'contrib' cdrom. Save this file as 'text' file and chmod a+rx on it. You can re-write this shell script in PERL so that you can use it on Window 95/NT or MSDOS. Uncomment the PRGM variable to point to bcpp, cb or indent
Verification program to check C++ Beautifiers 'bcpp', 'indent' or cb
Author: Al Dev (Alavoor Vasudevan) alavoor[AT?yahoo.com
check_beautify_now() {
\rm -f ${TMP_FILE} \rm -f ${TMP_CPPFILE}*.* FNAME=$1 if [ ! -f ${FNAME}?; then print "\nError: The file ${FNAME} does not exist!!. Aborting now ...." exit fi \cp -f ${FNAME} ${TMP_CPPFILE}.cpp ${COMPILER} -c ${TMP_CPPFILE}.cpp if [ ! -f ${TMP_CPPFILE}.o?; then print "Fatal Error: Failed to compile ${FNAME}. Aborting now... " exit fi \mv -f ${TMP_CPPFILE}.o ${TMP_CPPFILE}_orig.o aa=`basename $PRGM` print "\nRunning, verifying $aa on ${FNAME}" ${PRGM} ${TMP_CPPFILE}.cpp ${COMPILER} -c ${TMP_CPPFILE}.cpp \rm -f $TMP_FILE diff ${TMP_CPPFILE}.o ${TMP_CPPFILE}_orig.o 1> $TMP_FILE 2>> $TMP_FILE result="" result=`wc -c $TMP_FILE | awk '{print $1}' ` if [ "$result" = "0"?; then print "Success!! Beautifier $aa is working properly!!\n" else print "Fatal Error: Something wrong!! Beautifier is not working!!" exit fi
\rm -f ${TMP_FILE} \rm -f ${TMP_CPPFILE}*.* }
PRGM=/usr/bin/indent COMPILER=/usr/bin/g++ TMP_FILE=beautify.tmp TMP_CPPFILE=beautify-tmp_cppfile print -n "Enter the C++ file name <default is *.cpp> : " read ans if [ "$ans" = "" -o "$ans" = " "?; then ans="ALL" else FILENAME=$ans fi
\rm -f ${TMP_FILE} \rm -f ${TMP_CPPFILE}*.* if [ "$ans" != "ALL"?; then check_beautify_now ${FILENAME} else ls *.cpp | while read FILENAME do check_beautify_now ${FILENAME} done fi
Visit the following sites to get beautifiers for other languages like HTML, SQL, Java, Perl, Fortran.
http://www.digital-mines.com/htb/
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http://www.datacomm.ch/mwoog/software/perl/beautifier.html
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http://www.watson-net.com/free/perl/s_fhtml.asp
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http://www.netbula.com/products/sqlb
*
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http://www.geocities.com/starkville/vancbj.html
*
http://kevinkelley.mystarband.net/java/dent.html
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http://www.tiobe.com/jacobe.htm
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http://www.mmsindia.com/JPretty.html
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http://members.magnet.at/johann.langhofer/products/jxbeauty/overview.html
(has JBuilder support)
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http://www.semdesigns.com/Products/Formatters/!JavaFormatter.html
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http://www.semdesigns.com/Products/DMS/DMSToolkit.html
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http://home.wtal.de/software-solutions/jindent
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http://javaregex.com/cgi-bin/pat/jbeaut.asp
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http://www.redrival.com/greenrd/java/jstyle
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http://www.epoch.com.tw/download/ms/java/java.htm
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http://members.nextra.at/johann.langhofer/download/jxbeauty and the
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percolator *
http://www.java.about.com/compute/java/library/weekly/aa102499.htm
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VasJava2HTML *
http://www.mycgiserver.com/lisali/jccb
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http://www.consultix-inc.com/www.consultix-inc.com/talk.htm
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http://www.consultix-inc.com/www.consultix-inc.com/perl_beautifier.html
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http://www.aeem.iastate.edu/Fortran/tools.html
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http://dickey.his.com/bcpp/bcpp.html
or at
http://www.clark.net/pub/dickey.
BCPP ftp site is at
ftp://dickey.his.com/bcpp/bcpp.tar.gz
*
http://www.consultix-inc.com/c++b.html
*
http://www.chips.navy.mil/oasys/c/
and mirror at
Oasys
*
http://www.geocities.com/starkville/main.html
*
http://users.erols.com/astronaut/vim/ccb-1.07.tar.gz
and site at
http://users.erols.com/astronaut/vim/#vimlinks_src
*
Windows 95/98/NT/2000
http://perso.club-internet.fr/cbeaudet
*
http://www.consultix-inc.com/www.consultix-inc.com/talk.htm
*
To create presentation of codes to display using HTML -
http://www.perlstudio.de/cbindex.html
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http://www.gnu.org/software/src-highlite
and its KDE frontend Ksrc2html
http://murphy.netsolution-net.de/Ksrc2.html
*
Also search the search engines like
http://www.yahoo.com
or
http://www.lycos.com and search for keyword "beautfier".
Visit following locators which are related to C, C++ -
* Vim color text editor for C++, C *
* C++ Programming HOWTO *
* CVS HOWTO for C++ programs *
http://www.milkywaygalaxy.freeservers.com
and mirrors at
http://aldev0.webjump.com,
angelfire,
geocities,
virtualave,
50megs,
theglobe,
NBCi,
Terrashare,
Fortunecity,
Freewebsites,
Tripod,
Spree,
Escalix,
Httpcity,
Freeservers.
*
This document is published in 14 different formats namely - DVI, Postscript, Latex, Adobe Acrobat PDF, LyX, GNU-info, HTML, RTF(Rich Text Format), Plain-text, Unix man pages, single HTML file, SGML (Linuxdoc format), SGML (Docbook format), MS !WinHelp? format.
This howto document is located at -
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http://www.linuxdoc.org and click on HOWTOs and search
for howto document name using CTRL+f or ALT+f within the web-browser.
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You can also find this document at the following mirrors sites -
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http://www.caldera.com/LDP/HOWTO
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http://www.linux.ucla.edu/LDP
*
*
http://www.cc.gatech.edu/linux/LDP
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*
http://www.redhat.com/mirrors/LDP
*
http://www.linuxdoc.org/mirrors.html
select a site and go to directory /LDP/HOWTO/xxxxx-HOWTO.html
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Postscript or SGML formats from -
ftp://www.linuxdoc.org/pub/Linux/docs/HOWTO/other-formats/
and
http://www.linuxdoc.org/docs.html#howto
*
ftp://www.linuxdoc.org/pub/Linux/docs/HOWTO
and
http://www.linuxdoc.org/docs.html#howto
*
http://www.linuxdoc.org/docs.html#howto
Single HTML file can be created with command (see man sgml2html) -
sgml2html -split 0 xxxxhowto.sgml
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Chinese, Japanese are in
ftp://www.linuxdoc.org/pub/Linux/docs/HOWTO
and
http://www.linuxdoc.org/docs.html#howto
Any help from you to translate to other languages is welcome.
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The document is written using a tool called "SGML-Tools" which can be got from -
http://www.sgmltools.org
Compiling the source you will get the following commands like
*
*
*
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PDF file can be generated from postscript file using
either acrobat distill or Ghostscript.
And postscript file is generated
from DVI which in turn is generated from !LaTex? file.
You can download distill software from
http://www.adobe.com. Given below
is a sample session:
bash$ man sgml2latex bash$ sgml2latex filename.sgml bash$ man dvips bash$ dvips -o filename.ps filename.dvi bash$ distill filename.ps bash$ man ghostscript bash$ man ps2pdf bash$ ps2pdf input.ps output.pdf bash$ acroread output.pdf &
Or you can use Ghostscript command ps2pdf. ps2pdf is a work-alike for nearly all the functionality of Adobe's Acrobat Distiller product: it converts !PostScript files to Portable Document Format (PDF) files. ps2pdf is implemented as a very small command script (batch file) that invokes Ghostscript, selecting a special "output device" called pdfwrite. In order to use ps2pdf, the pdfwrite device must be included in the makefile when Ghostscript was compiled; see the documentation on building Ghostscript for details.
This document is written in linuxdoc SGML format. The Docbook SGML format supercedes the linuxdoc format and has lot more features than linuxdoc. The linuxdoc is very simple and is easy to use. To convert linuxdoc SGML file to Docbook SGML use the program ld2db.sh and some perl scripts. The ld2db output is not 100% clean and you need to use the clean_ld2db.pl perl script. You may need to manually correct few lines in the document.
http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/rrt/docbook.html
or from
Milkyway Galaxy site
*
from Milkyway Galaxy *
The ld2db.sh is not 100% clean, you will get lots of errors when you run
bash$ ld2db.sh file-linuxdoc.sgml db.sgml bash$ cleanup.pl db.sgml > db_clean.sgml bash$ gvim db_clean.sgml bash$ docbook2html db.sgml
And you may have to manually edit some of the minor errors after running the perl script. For e.g. you may need to put closing tag < /Para> for each < Listitem>
You can convert the SGML howto document to Microsoft Windows Help file, first convert the sgml to html using:
bash$ sgml2html xxxxhowto.sgml (to generate html file) bash$ sgml2html -split 0 xxxxhowto.sgml (to generate a single page html file)
Then use the tool
You can also use sgml2rtf and then use the RTF files for generating winhelp files.
In order to view the document in dvi format, use the xdvi program. The xdvi program is located in tetex-xdvi*.rpm package in Redhat Linux which can be located through !ControlPanel | Applications | Publishing | TeX menu buttons. To read dvi document give the command -
xdvi -geometry 80x90 howto.dvi man xdvi
And resize the window with mouse. To navigate use Arrow keys, Page Up, Page Down keys, also you can use 'f', 'd', 'u', 'c', 'l', 'r', 'p', 'n' letter keys to move up, down, center, next page, previous page etc. To turn off expert menu press 'x'.
You can read postscript file using the program 'gv' (ghostview) or 'ghostscript'. The ghostscript program is in ghostscript*.rpm package and gv program is in gv*.rpm package in Redhat Linux which can be located through !ControlPanel | Applications | Graphics menu buttons. The gv program is much more user friendly than ghostscript. Also ghostscript and gv are available on other platforms like OS/2, Windows 95 and NT, you view this document even on those platforms.
all OSes from
http://www.cs.wisc.edu/ghost
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To read postscript document give the command -
gv howto.ps ghostscript howto.ps
You can read HTML format document using Netscape Navigator, Microsoft Internet explorer, Redhat Baron Web browser or any of the 10 other web browsers.
You can read the latex, LyX output using LyX a X-Windows front end to latex.
Copyright policy is GNU/GPL as per LDP (Linux Documentation project). LDP is a GNU/GPL project. Additional restrictions are - you must retain the author's name, email address and this copyright notice on all the copies. If you make any changes or additions to this document then you should intimate all the authors of this document.
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