tokei/CONTRIBUTING.md

Contributing to Tokei

• Language Addition
• Bug Reports

Language Addition

Currently tokei generates languages from the languages.json file. JSON was decided to make it easy to add new languages, and change code structure without changing large data structures. Here we will go over the properties of a language in languages.json, through examples.

"JavaScript":{
    "base":"c",
    "quotes":[
        [
            "\\\"",
            "\\\""
        ],
        [
            "'",
            "'"
        ],
        [
            "`",
            "`"
        ]
    ],
    "extensions":[
        "js"
    ]
},

Above is the JavaScript's definition. The first thing that needs to be defined is the key, the keys format should be same as Rust's enum style. As this key will be used in an enum for identifying the language. For a lot of language's this also works for showing the language when we print to the screen. However there are some languages whose names don't work with the enum style. For example JSON is usually shown in all caps, but that doesn't fit in Rust's enum style. So we have an additional optional field called name, which defines how the language should look when displayed to the user.

"Json" {
    "name": "JSON",

For defining comments has a few properties: firstly is the most commonly used single property which defines single line comments. Comments which don't continue onto the next line.

let x = 5; // default x position
let y = 0; // default y position

The single property expects an array of strings, as some languages have multiple syntaxes for defining a a single line comment. For example PHP allows both # and // as comments.

"Php": {
    "single": [
        "#",
        "//"
    ]

For defining comments that also have a ending syntax, there is the multi_line property.

let x = /* There is a reason
    for this comment I swear */
    10;

A lot of languages have the same commenting syntax usually inheriting from the authors previous language or preferred language. In order to avoid code reuse tokei's languages have a base property which says to use a common comment syntax.

• Name of the language
• Any file extensions associated with the language
• The comment syntax
  • Does it have multiple single line comment symbols?
  • Does it only contain single line comments? Or only multi-line comments?
  • Is just C style comments? /* */, //

Bug Reports

Please include the error message, and a minimum working example including the file, or file structure.

This file crashes the program.

<filename>
\`\`\`
\`\`\`