How to Check Format of Your C++ Code

As a concern of a group work in development, understandability and standards have a significant place. For the purposes of suitability, each work done by different team members should have a coherence. This behavior avoids different code writings which may confuse developers. It is also a control mechanism against unexpected weird code blocks. Maybe someone in your team has an interest to write his code squeezed in a square block :)

The team is coding in c++. They agree on a coding standard. Each member will check their code before committing. For this purpose, I have discovered clang-format tool which provides easy and quick formatting. Its integration to CLion is also simple. However, if you would like to do a double check before merging a code, there is more to do. 

Continuous integration is an option to check whether the committed code is in desired format or not. If it does not suit, then CI job fails. At the very beginning, related job is started. If it fails, it will force the committer to correct the code. Otherwise, the work will be ignored. Currently, I could not find a complete and mature solution which provides this functionality. clang-format only gives the formatted version of the given input. But it does not have a verification functionality. However, it is elegant, light-weight and effective in formatting. Therefore, I have written a bash script (see the code block below) to achieve this goal by using clang-format. It recursively traverses all files in a directory whose path is passed as an argument. Names of files which violate the standards are printed out. If such files exist, the script returns 1 which is a fail state. In this case, the CI job fails. If all files satisfy the standards, the script successfully concludes. Then, upcoming CI jobs, if exist, start. Alternatively, the script can be run locally to see which files need an update.

Each member can check their code by using clang-format locally. For the coherence in a group work, an extra check may be necessary. It depends on the team's concern. Free to use this code block if you think it is useful for you. If you think there is a better way or if you have an idea to improve this way further, please drop a comment. Happy coding.