Turn off Eclipse formatter for selected code area? [duplicate]

Question

When I ctrl+shift+f up the project code, its doing its job just fine, everywhere.

But its messing the CSS, specially those filter parts and adding bunch of spaces.

Also how do I specify some portion of Java code to not be formated by that command ?

Irruptive

Do you have a CSS inside your .java class? – Hurff

nope. .css but i want the annotation or stuff like given here @formator:on and off but dont know how to implement it #1821408 – Irruptive

Answer 1

To prevent specific portions of Java code from being formatted, go to "Window > Preferences > Java > Code Style > Formatter". Click the "Edit..." button, go to the "Off/On Tags" tab and enable the tags. Afterwards, you can simply embed those tags in Java code to disable the formatting in-between them. If you don't change the default tags, something like this will do :

//@formatter:off
this.
    portion.of(code
); // will not be touched by the formatter
//@formatter:on
but this will be
       reformatted.

IIRC, this option only exists since Eclipse 3.6.

As for css code, if you have installed Eclipse WTP, go to "Window > Preferences > Web > CSS Files > Editor" and you will find some basic formatting options there.

Valvule

awesome . thanks , its aint in Galileo but its in Helios ., – Irruptive

Yes, that was my "only exists since Eclipse 3.6" part :). I wasn't sure, but your comment did confirm that this option wasn't in Eclipse 3.5 (Galileo). – Valvule

Note this needs to be enabled in your preferences formatter settings. – Raconteur

Any short cut to do this for a block of code with out typing formatter:off and on? – Whitebait

Nice one. Is there a similar feature for organise imports. As I do not want static imports * to be removed. For eg. import static io.restassured.RestAssured.*; – Aporia

It is not working with my Eclipse 2021-03 installation. What could be the problem? – Superimpose

Answer 2

You cannot configure the formatting at class level, but you can configure at the project level. To do the configuration follow this path in eclipse

window->preferences-> java -> code style -> formatter

now select the configure project specific settings and do your changes.

Paltry

Quite helpful thanks!! – Pyriform