Format this!

If, like me, you've got a free Blogspot blog, and you've wrestled with your blog posts, painstakingly adding spaces throughout your sample source code, only to see them cruelly removed and reformatted by Blogspot, then here's a useful on-line resource to use to keep you from falling into the pit of insanity.

http://formatmysourcecode.blogspot.com/

It'll take your source code for you, convert it to HTML that renders in a neat little dotted margin box.

Here's a sample of arbitrary source code. Here's what it looks like without any assistance - I simply took some code, copied it, and pasted it in. Bear in mind, it was correctly formatted initially:

/**
* The HelloWorldApp class implements an application that
* simply prints "Hello World!" and some other stuff to
* standard output.
*/
public class HelloWorldApp {

/**
* Creates a new instance of HelloWorldApp
*/
public HelloWorldApp() {
}

/**
* The main entry point.
*
* @param args the command line arguments
*/
public static void main(String[] args) {
System.out.println("Hello World!");
for (int i = 0; i < 10; i++) {
switch (i) {
case 0:
System.out.println("Starting");
break;
case 9:
System.out.println("Ending");
break;
}
System.out.println("Looping " + (i + 1));
}
System.out.println("Goodbye World!");
}
}

Yick! What a mess. Clearly you can see that's not what we're after. The indentation has gone, the line breaks are gone and if you stare too long, your eyes may bleed.

So, a quick Google search and we discover that putting a "pre" block around your source code will preserve its formatting thusly:

/**
 * The HelloWorldApp class implements an application that
 * simply prints "Hello World!" and some other stuff to
 * standard output.
 */
public class HelloWorldApp {

    /**
     * Creates a new instance of HelloWorldApp
     */
    public HelloWorldApp() {
    }

    /**
     * The main entry point.
     *
     * @param args the command line arguments
     */
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        System.out.println("Hello World!");
        System.out.println("This is a really long string that will probably not show the entire line since it is really long.");
        for (int i = 0; i < 10; i++) {
            switch (i) {
                case 0:
                    System.out.println("Starting");
                    break;
                case 9:
                    System.out.println("Ending");
                    break;
            }
            System.out.println("Looping " + (i + 1));
        }
        System.out.println("Goodbye World!");
    }
}

But it still isn't quite there yet is it? In my case, my blog template snips off the end of long lines as per the second line printed above.
So, FormatMySourceCode to the rescue. I pasted the above code into the top text area, hit the "Format Text" button, and the copied the resultant HTML in here:

/**
 * The HelloWorldApp class implements an application that
 * simply prints "Hello World!" and some other stuff to
 * standard output.
 */
public class HelloWorldApp {

   /**
    * Creates a new instance of HelloWorldApp
    */
   public HelloWorldApp() {
   }

   /**
    * The main entry point.
    *
    * @param args the command line arguments
    */
   public static void main(String[] args) {
       System.out.println("Hello World!");
       System.out.println("This is a really long string that will probably not show the entire line since it is really long.");
       for (int i = 0; i < 10; i++) {
           switch (i) {
               case 0:
                   System.out.println("Starting");
                   break;
               case 9:
                   System.out.println("Ending");
                   break;
           }
           System.out.println("Looping " + (i + 1));
       }
       System.out.println("Goodbye World!");
   }
}

Now that looks a lot better don't you think? And it has a nifty scrolling feature for any long lines.

It's still not ideal. It'd be nice if the Blogspot website had support for stuff like this built-in, so you didn't have to go to the "Edit Html" tab.
But it's better than nothing.