The Web Forms editor (viewing ASPX source) has a command "Edit | Advanced -> Format Document".  This command doesn't exist when I open up a .js file for editing.  I have some scrpt that has been compacted, and is impossible to read.  Is there any way to automatically format the JavaScript so it is readable (insert line breaks and tabs, etc.)?

Has it been compacted by human hands or by a programmatic obfuscator?

I'm not sure.  The variable names are human readable, but the spacing seems as if it was optimized by either a program or standard regular expressions.  Here's a sample:

if(isRef)

{this.dtRefresh=(new Date()).getTime();}}};function initACB(divid,Id,fw,fh)

{adCont[Id].acbObj=null;adCont[Id].acb=(typeof(adCont[Id].acb)!='undefined')?adCont[Id].acb:true;var acbNeeded=(fw<acbMinWdth)?false:adCont[Id].acb;if(adCont[Id].acb)

{var lbl=acbAdv;_dapUtils.acbSetLg();var acbLocLg=_dapUtils.acbLg!="en"&&_dapUtils.acbLg!="noacb";if(acbLocLg)

{lbl="";acbGetLocStrs(adCont[Id].divid);}

 

I just wrote this in a few minutes. It is very crude on how it works. It loops through the text looking for { or } or ; using a setTimeout. Reason for setTimeout is big loops freeze the browser.

 http://www.pascarello.com/examples/formatCode.html

It will make some things look funny, but it is better than nothing.

 If I did not have the flu and I did not have tons of work to do and if it was before midnight I might have tried a little harder using split() with regular expressions to reduce a bunch of redundant calls that charAt() causes.

Eric

Hey Dan,

Formatting is NOT currently available for JavaScript in Visual Studio 2005 and current plans dictate that it won't be available for Visual Studio "Orcas" either.  I'm actually trying to fit the feature into our schedule at the moment.  I'd personally would really like to see this done.  Customer feedback from you guys would definitely help! =)

Hope this helps,
Jeff

 

Jeff,

This day in age, there is an abundance of Javascript examples and references online.  A lot of people don't want to re-invent the wheel so they do a quick search and find a suitable javascript example in a matter of minutes and tweak it to perfectly meet their needs.  I have done this so many times, it is almost natural.  Unfortunately, the perfectionist in me forces me to re-do the indentation and whitespacing of these examples just to be uniform with my other javascript functions.  Because of this, I think it would be far more usable and practical to include Javascript formatting in Visual Studio.  If I had a choice of one formatting to be available, I would choose the Javascript formatting over any other.  It just makes sense to me because I very rarely have to format any other code.

Tell Mr. Guthrie that it has to be done

Jeff.aspx:

Hey Dan,

Formatting is NOT currently available for JavaScript in Visual Studio 2005...Customer feedback from you guys would definitely help! =)

I can tell you that this feature would help everyone who works on the Windows Live properties (http://spaces.live.com, http://local.live.com, etc) because we have so much client-side script on our pages now. If you want more information, or a more formal 'feature request' just send me an internal e-mail. I'm on the Spaces team now.

JavaScript formatting would be great. I've noticed over the past year our team has started using JavaScript a lot more. Would help out with coding standards especially now that ASP.NET AJAX is released. You know those brackets are all over the place:

function multiply(one, two) {
}

function multiply(one, two)
{
}

function multiply(one, two) { }

It sure would be great to have a javascript formatter in Visual Studio.

Right now, I cut/paste my javascript (in my .aspx/.ascx files) to my Visual Slick Edit editor, "Beautify" it, then paste it back into Visual Studio.  Sure would be nice to skip this step!

 Regards,

 Andy

Actually, maybe another way to approach this would be to have a "format as" function in the formatter - select a bunch of whatever, and apply the same formatting rules.

This would be an awesome feature allowing a standard formatting schema for C++, C#, javascript etc etc etc 

This would also solve the problem of embedded code sections in .aspx files and the like - 10 lines of javascript  - hey format that sucker as javascript/C#, 10 lines of HTML - format that sucker too -  some C# or VB code within <% %> tags - select that sucker and format as desired! Wow - I love it!

Similarly those of use who are pedants and like to see our HTML formatted the same as our XML - would be really happy.

 
Thanks for listening
 

 

 

It certainly would make my life a lot easier right now, taking some 3rd party javascript code which was compressed by removing all of the spaces and carriage returns and having all of the code on one line... :(

Until Visual Studio adds that feature,  Try http://elfz.laacz.lv/beautify/  pretty cool online formatter for javascript

By the way, with the release of Visual Studio 2008 SP1, "Format Document" for .js files will be supported.  Additionally, we will support formatting as you type.  More information here:

http://blogs.msdn.com/webdevtools/archive/2008/05/12/introducing-jscript-formatting-in-vs-2008-sp1.aspx