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Have PowerShell formatter remove trailing whitespace when formatting a file

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#5,111 2 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

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Assessment

Difficulty
3/5
Estimated time
1-2 days
Newbie friendliness
42/100
Issue type
Feature
Clarity
Mostly clear
Activity status
Stale
Tech stack
powershell, typescript, vscode

Research direction

The issue does not name a source file or test. Start by locating the PowerShell formatter implementation in this TypeScript VS Code extension and reproduce formatting on a file with trailing whitespace. Done means formatted output removes trailing whitespace without changing unrelated content, with coverage in the relevant formatting tests if they exist.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

Area-Code Formatting Area-Script Analysis Issue-Enhancement
Prerequisites
  • I have written a descriptive issue title.
  • I have searched all issues to ensure it has not already been reported.
Summary

When allowing the PSScriptAnalyzerSettings.psd1 to show Information-level problems, it adds a lot of overhead in formatting files that have lines with trailing whitespaces. Since this recommendation is mostly aesthetic/non-breaking, as is the automated code formatting in general, I'd like to see the formatter for PowerShell remove these trailing whitespaces characters.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/utility-modules/psscriptanalyzer/rules/avoidtrailingwhitespace?view=ps-modules

Because we can't store a centralized configuration for PSScriptAnalyzerSettings.psd1 in source control at the repo/workspace level to have it be taken automatically be any user working on that repo, having per-user rules to suppress this aren't really practical. I did see a separate thread in this project's issues noting individual users can set a configuration flag to do this, but again, having every user do that themselves vs. having a central linting rule is frustrating to maintain adherence on. Short of having a CI/CD pipeline hard reject any PSScriptAnalyzer errors to force them to check in cleaned code, an automated approach is best.

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Proposed Design

No response

Dominant language
TypeScript
Stars
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Forks
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PR merge metrics
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