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Formatting misses certain keywords (unary operators, 'until')

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#2,095 4 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

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Assessment

Difficulty
3/5
Estimated time
1-2 days
Newbie friendliness
48/100
Issue type
Bug
Clarity
Clearly specified
Activity status
Stale
Tech stack
csharp, powershell
Domain
tooling

Research direction

Start by running the supplied reproducer through Invoke-Formatter and compare the result with the expected output. Trace the formatter's handling of keyword spacing for while and until, then unary operators such as -not and -bnot. Done means the formatted output separates these keywords and operators as shown for the reported cases.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

Area - Formatter Issue - Enhancement Up for Grabs

I found that during formatting, some keywords aren't separated from leading braces (while), and some are seemingly ignored entirely (until). Also, unary operators (-not, -bnot, etc.) aren't separated with whitespace the same way as binary operators (-eq, -like, etc.).

Steps to reproduce

  1. Paste the following into a script
  2. Use Invoke-Formatter or the PowerShell VSCode extension to format the document
if(-not$false) {
    do{
        "Hello!"
    }until(
        $True
    )
    do{
        "Oh, hi!"
    }while(
        -not$True
    )
    while(-not$True) {
        "This won't show up."
    }
}

Expected behavior

Roughly the following output. Some is dependent on brace style (OTBS in this case), but all rules for inserting whitespace around keywords and operators should be enabled.

if (-not $false) {
    do {
        'Hello!'
    } until (
        $True
    )
    do {
        'Oh, hi!'
    } while (
        -not $True
    )
    while (-not $True) {
        "This won't show up."
    }
}

Actual behavior

if (-not$false) { # -not isn't separated by whitespace
    do {
        'Hello!'
    }until( # no whitespace around Until
        $True
    )
    do {
        'Oh, hi!'
    }while ( # only trailing whitespace for While
        -not$True # no separation
    )
    while (-not$True) { # no separation for -not and -bnot
        "This won't show up."
    }
}

Environment data

> $PSVersionTable
Name                           Value
----                           -----
PSVersion                      5.1.19041.5737
PSEdition                      Desktop
PSCompatibleVersions           {1.0, 2.0, 3.0, 4.0...}
BuildVersion                   10.0.19041.5737
CLRVersion                     4.0.30319.42000
WSManStackVersion              3.0
PSRemotingProtocolVersion      2.3
SerializationVersion           1.1.0.1

> (Get-Module -ListAvailable PSScriptAnalyzer).Version | ForEach-Object { $_.ToString() }
1.23.0

1.23.0 is the version included with the current (2025.0.0) VSCode PowerShell extension. I've also installed and tested 1.24.0 with the same results.

Dominant language
C#
Stars
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Forks
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Avg merge
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Merged PRs (30d)
2

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