Invoke-Formatter is not idempotent on `--%` verbatim arguments

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Assessment

Difficulty
3/5
Estimated time
1-2 days
Newbie friendliness
55/100
Issue type
Bug
Clarity
Mostly clear
Activity status
Active
Tech stack
powershell
Domain
tooling

Research direction

Start by reproducing the repeated Invoke-Formatter example with a native command using the --% stop-parsing token. Inspect PSUseConsistentWhitespace's CheckPipe handling around the verbatim-argument extent; done means repeated formatting leaves spacing stable instead of inserting another space before |.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

Steps to reproduce

Run the formatter repeatedly on a native command that uses the stop-parsing token:

$formatted = $null
1..3 | ForEach-Object {
    $formatted = Invoke-Formatter ($formatted ?? 'cmd --% raw | text & stuff')
    $formatted
}

Expected behavior

Formatting already formatted output should be a no-op. Spacing adjacent to the verbatim argument should either be left untouched or normalized once to a stable result.

Actual behavior

One additional space is inserted before | on every run:

cmd --% raw  | text & stuff
cmd --% raw   | text & stuff
cmd --% raw    | text & stuff

The output grows without bound in a format-on-save loop.

The verbatim-argument token owns the text up to the pipe. PSUseConsistentWhitespace with CheckPipe sees a zero-width gap before | and inserts a space inside the verbatim argument's extent on each formatting pass.

Environment data

Reproduced with:

  • PSScriptAnalyzer 1.25.0 on PowerShell 7.5.2
  • PSScriptAnalyzer 1.25.0 on PowerShell 7.6.3
  • PSScriptAnalyzer built from main at PowerShell/PSScriptAnalyzer@4b0117ca7d2887711c9699f467ba7171f8859156 on PowerShell 7.6.4
Dominant language
C#
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Forks
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Merged PRs (30d)
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