detect-indent

What is detect-indent?

The detect-indent npm package is designed to analyze a given piece of text and determine the indentation style used. This can be particularly useful in scenarios where maintaining consistent code formatting is crucial, such as in collaborative coding projects. It can detect both spaces and tabs used for indentation and provide information about the most used indentation type and size.

What are detect-indent's main functionalities?

Detecting indentation from a string

This feature allows you to pass a string of text to the `detectIndent` function, which analyzes the indentation used in the text. It returns an object containing the amount of indentation, the type of indentation (spaces or tabs), and the actual indentation string.

const detectIndent = require('detect-indent');
const code = '  const x = 1;\n  const y = 2;';
const indent = detectIndent(code);
console.log(indent); // {amount: 2, type: 'space', indent: '  '}

Other packages similar to detect-indent

indent-string

The indent-string package is used for adding indentation to strings. While detect-indent is focused on detecting and analyzing indentation, indent-string allows you to modify strings by adding a specified amount of indentation. This makes indent-string complementary to detect-indent, as you could detect indentation with one and apply it with the other.

strip-indent

Strip-indent is designed to remove leading indentation from every line in a string. This is somewhat the inverse of what detect-indent does; while detect-indent identifies the indentation style and level, strip-indent removes it entirely. This can be useful in preprocessing text to normalize indentation before further processing or display.

README

detect-indent

Detect the indentation of code

Pass in a string of any kind of text and get the indentation.

Use cases

• Persisting the indentation when modifying a file.
• Have new content match the existing indentation.
• Setting the right indentation in your editor.

Install

$ npm install --save detect-indent

Usage

Accepts a string and returns the indentation or null if it can't be detected.

// modify a JSON file while persisting the indentation in Node
var fs = require('fs');
var detectIndent = require('detect-indent');
/*
{
    "ilove": "pizza"
}
*/
var file = fs.readFileSync('foo.json', 'utf8');
// tries to detect the indentation and falls back to a default if it can't
var indent = detectIndent(file) || '    ';
var json = JSON.parse(file);

json.ilove = 'unicorns';

fs.writeFileSync('foo.json', JSON.stringify(json, null, indent));
/*
{
    "ilove": "unicorns"
}
*/

CLI

$ npm install --global detect-indent

$ detect-indent --help

Usage
  $ detect-indent <file>
  $ echo <string> | detect-indent

Example
  $ echo '  foo\n  bar' | detect-indent | wc --chars
  2

License

MIT © Sindre Sorhus