Hacktoberfest 2026: the issues maintainers tagged for October, open and beginner-friendly. Browse Hacktoberfest issues

Allow lines to start with `@foo` inside a block tag like `{@code}`

Open
#824 0 comments 1 reaction 0 assignees View on GitHub

Maintainers usually reply within 1 day

Nobody has claimed this yet.

Assessment

Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Newbie friendliness
35/100
Issue type
Feature
Clarity
Mostly clear
Activity status
Stale
Tech stack
java
Domain
tooling

Research direction

Begin by reproducing the Javadoc block-tag case described in the issue, including a line starting with @Override, and use JDK-8241780 as context for the Java 15 behavior. No files or tests are named; done should mean the formatter accepts the intended @foo lines without treating the surrounding inline tag as invalid.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

IIRC, we currently consider such an appearance of @foo to be an invalid tag (or, if it is a recognized one like @return, maybe a valid tag? or maybe never a valid tag because we're upset that the previous inline tag was never closed?). It is invalid... until Java 15, at which point https://bugs.openjdk.org/browse/JDK-8241780 saves us.

On those grounds, we don't format the Javadoc at all (which is not necessarily a great failure mode, but that's another issue).

Maybe we should just allow this, at least for cases that are not normally Javadoc tags, like @Override?

Dominant language
Java
Stars
6.2k
Forks
936
Avg merge
6m
Merged PRs (30d)
3

Getting set up

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

More from google/google-java-format

All issues in google/google-java-format

Similar issues

More Java issues

Get new issues in your inbox

A short digest of beginner-friendly GitHub issues.