(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
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
Save this file -
mv myprogram.o myprogram_orig.o
Now run bcpp -
bcpp myprogram.cpp
g++ -c myprogram.cpp
Now use the unix 'diff' command to compare the two object files -
diff myprogram.o myprogram_orig.o
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
diff myprogram.s myprogram_orig.s
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
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
#!/bin/ksh # Verification program to check C++ Beautifiers 'bcpp', 'indent' or cb ############################################################ # Copyright # The copyright policy is GNU/GPL. # Author: Al Dev (Alavoor Vasudevan) alavoor[AT]yahoo.com ############################################################ check_beautify_now() { # Remove all the temp files.... \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 # ${COMPILER} -S ${TMP_CPPFILE}.cpp # diff ${TMP_CPPFILE}.s ${TMP_CPPFILE}_orig.s # Remove all the temp files.... \rm -f ${TMP_FILE} \rm -f ${TMP_CPPFILE}*.* } ########## Main of program begins here ##################3 #PRGM=/usr/bin/bcpp #PRGM=/usr/bin/cb PRGM=/usr/bin/indent COMPILER=/usr/bin/g++ TMP_FILE=beautify.tmp TMP_CPPFILE=beautify-tmp_cppfile print -n "Enter the C++ file name <default is *.cpp> : " read ans if [ "$ans" = "" -o "$ans" = " " ]; then ans="ALL" else FILENAME=$ans fi # Remove all the temp files.... \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 ${FILENAME} done fi
Visit the following sites to get beautifiers for other languages like HTML, SQL, Java, Perl, Fortran.
To create presentation of codes to display using HTML -
Visit following locators which are related to C, C++ -
This document is published in 14 different formats namely - DVI, Postscript, Latex, Adobe Acrobat PDF, LyX, GNU-info, HTML, RTF(Rich Text Format), Plain-text, Unix man pages, single HTML file, SGML (Linuxdoc format), SGML (Docbook format), MS WinHelp format.
This howto document is located at -
You can also find this document at the following mirrors sites -
Single HTML file can be created with command (see man sgml2html) - sgml2html -split 0 xxxxhowto.sgml
PDF file can be generated from postscript file using either acrobat distill or Ghostscript. And postscript file is generated from DVI which in turn is generated from LaTex file. You can download distill software from http://www.adobe.com. Given below is a sample session:
bash$ 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 &
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.
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
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)
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.
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.