Select "if else" alignment style

[trane77]

I think it would be nice to select the style of if/else blocks, it's a feature I miss coming from phpStorm.

Now:

if ($a === 1) {
  // ...
} else if ($a === 2) {
  // ...
} else {
  // ...
}

Add new line after each if/else block:

if ($a === 1) {
  // ...
} 
else if ($a === 2) {
  // ...
} 
else {
  // ...
}

Being able to keep simple if/else blocks on one line would be a nice to have feature:

if ($a === 1) { /* ... */ } 
else if ($a === 2) { /* ... */ } 
else { /* ... */ }

Blocks can also be aligned ( too much? 😃 ):

if ($a === 1)      { /* ... */ } 
else if ($a === 2) { /* ... */ } 
else               { /* ... */ }

[lkrms]

Thanks for raising this 😊

Striking the right balance between "minimally configurable" (as an opinionated formatter should be) and "configurable enough for wide appeal/adoption" is tricky with a developer community as diverse as PHP's, and removing options is much harder than adding them, so I hope it's okay if I take the time to let this one percolate before deciding how to proceed.

In the meantime:

• The drupal preset already formats control structures in the way you've described, but that's not all it does, and enabling a preset disables most other options, so this may or may not be useful to you.

• Are you aware of any formal code styles/standards or large projects (other than Drupal) that take this approach? Evidence that it's adopted more widely than I've seen to date would make it easier to justify adding a standalone option.

• Enabling "preserve one line statements" (--enable preserve-one-line via the CLI) almost covers your third example, except that it currently only works when the whole control structure appears on one line. I think I'll extend that to cover multiple one-line if/else blocks in the same structure, but aligning the braces might be a bridge too far 😂

  (pretty-php has some opt-in alignment rules, so I'm not saying it won't happen, but these rules achieve the opposite of minimising diff size, so they're not a high priority moving forward.)

[lkrms]

Update: the change to the preserve-one-line rule is in and will be part of the next release. Here's one of its unit tests to demonstrate:

Input

<?php
if ($foo) {foo();} // comment
elseif ($bar) {bar();} // comment
else {baz();} // comment
// comment
if ($foo) {foo();} elseif ($bar) {bar();}
else {baz();}
if ($foo) {foo();}
elseif ($bar) {bar();} else if ($baz) {baz();} else {qux();}
if ($foo) {foo();}
if ($foo) {foo();} else {bar();}
try {foo();}
catch (LogicException $ex) {bar();}
catch (Throwable $ex) {baz();}
finally {qux();}

Output

<?php
if ($foo) { foo(); }  // comment
elseif ($bar) { bar(); }  // comment
else { baz(); }  // comment

// comment
if ($foo) { foo(); }
elseif ($bar) { bar(); }
else { baz(); }

if ($foo) { foo(); }
elseif ($bar) { bar(); }
else if ($baz) { baz(); }
else { qux(); }

if ($foo) { foo(); }
if ($foo) { foo(); } else { bar(); }

try { foo(); }
catch (LogicException $ex) { bar(); }
catch (Throwable $ex) { baz(); }
finally { qux(); }

As you can see:

• The same formatting applies to try/catch/finally
• Blank lines are added to mitigate readability impacts
• Statements are moved to their own line if necessary
• One-line control structures are unaffected by the change