Format of .clang-format file?

[Gruntfuggly]

Is there any documentation for the format of the .clang-format file when the "file" settings is used?

From experimentation, the only way I can get the .clang-format file to work is if it's contents are in the same format as suggested in the settings comments.

For example:

{
    BasedOnStyle: Mozilla,
    NamespaceIndentation: Inner,
    AccessModifierOffset: -4,
    UseTab: Never,
    BreakBeforeBraces: Allman}

Note - the closing brace needs to be on the same line as the last statement. or it doesn't work.

Is this expected? If I use a standard clang-format file (non-JSON), it doesn't work.

I would like to be able to specify a custom format for BreakBeforeBraces, but I don't know how to then specify the BraceWrapping sub flags. I've tried several combinations of JSON and flags names, but it simply fails to format the file.

Is there a way to get any diagnostic information?

[sean-mcmanus]

The clang-format documentation is unfortunately not very good, particularly in regards to examples and explanations of usage: http://releases.llvm.org/3.8.0/tools/clang/docs/ClangFormatStyleOptions.html . The .clang-format file is not supposed to contain JSON. You can call the binary itself to output a sample, e.g. clang-format -style=llvm -dump-config > .clang-format. Our extension doesn't expose the clang-format errors unfortunately. You could try to get errors via calling the .exe itself.

It seems you want to use something like

BreakBeforeBraces: Custom
BraceWrapping:
    AfterClass: true

[Gruntfuggly]

I'm not sure what is going wrong then, because if I put the above snippet into ~/.clang-format, it simply fails. If the file contains the contents that I originally posted it works.

e.g.

BreakBeforeBraces: Allman

fails, but

{
    BreakBeforeBraces: Allman}

works.

It looks like the extension reads the file and uses it as if the content was inserted directly into "clang-format.style" from the settings file?

[sean-mcmanus]

Oh, I found that we have a bug logged with the .clang-format file not working on Linux/Mac. I can't get the .clang-format to work at all on Linux, even with the inline formatting.

[Gruntfuggly]

Sorry - I should have added some platform specifics.

It does work for me on Linux (without the flags), but that last bracket needs to be on the same line. 8-)

[sean-mcmanus]

That is strange. I can't repro the behavior you're describing, and I debugged the code on Linux and we're failing to recognize the .clang-format file completely and it's using the hard-coded "Visual Studio" style. I assume fixing this issue would also fix your scenario, even though I can't repro the symptom. It won't be fixed in the next update, but we have a bunch of Linux-only bugs we'll hopefully be able to fix in the update after the next one.

[Gruntfuggly]

OK. At the moment I'm using a separate clang-format extension with formatting disabled in C/C++. Seems to work OK, but it would be cool have it all in the one extension.

If you need further details of my set up, let me know.

[avalon1610]

{
BreakBeforeBraces: Allman,
}

this may works.
seems clang-format parse comma incorrectly. Also note there must be "one" blank space after colon

[bobbrow]

We now print clang-format errors to the Output window to help you diagnose issues with the file format. If you are still having problems with this, let us know.