Separate each entry of brace-enclosed lists with new-line via clang-format

Question

I have brace-enclosed lists to initialize an array. I'd like to have my array initializers new-line for each entry of the array, which looks like:

const char* const array_of_strings[] = {
    "Hey",
    "Hi",
    "Hello",
    "Soup",
    "Atom"
};

Though, clang-format formats this array to:

const char *const array_of_strings[] = {"Hey", "Hi", "Hello", "Soup", "Atom"};

usually new lining once the list gets past ColumnLimit. Is my wanted formatting possible using clang-format?

Eric Backus · Accepted Answer · 2020-10-14 17:24:02Z

10

It is mostly possible. You need two things:

Set the BinPackArguments style option to false. I guess clang-format is treating the brace-enclosed initializer list as arguments. (The documentation doesn't really specify this, but it seems reasonable.)
Use the comma-after-last-item feature. To do this, add a comma between "Atom" and the closing brace. This feature is not documented anywhere that I've seen, but it has been in clang-format for many versions and many years.

With both of the above, and otherwise default clang-format settings, your output would look like:

const char *const array_of_strings[] = {
    "Hey",
    "Hi",
    "Hello",
    "Soup",
    "Atom",
};

answered Oct 14, 2020 at 17:24

Eric Backus

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1 Comment

Taras Palczynski Over a year ago

Thank you, this works wonderfully! It is interesting that the comma-after-last-item feature is needed. Without it, clang-format tries to put the first element and last element on the same line as the brackets. It'd be interesting to see if that feature is actually documented or not.

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