Automatic code formatting in SAS Communities posts

[RichardDeVen]

Add some ML to the back end so that when users, especially new users, post SAS code in their posting it is automatically detected and placed in a code block.

No offense, not sure why there is a "Insert SAS Code" and a "Insert Code" feature in the posting editor.  They appear to be the same.  Not sure why some code blocks appear as boxed with white background, slightly oversized font and syntax highlighting.

[ballardw]

More of a "Community Matters" suggestion than a SASWare Ballot.

The "running man" does the syntax highlighting as I think it is supposed to emulated the code editor more. And the </> is more for plain text such as logs, text examples of data files and such. Are they both needed? Probably not. But those who actually use the "running man" icon in other SAS products might find it familiar and preferred. Me, I learned keystrokes too long ago to like any point-and-grunt interface for frequently used actions.

[ChrisHemedinger]

Marking this Under Consideration -- but implementation would not be exactly as stated in the idea.  We are working on improving the "insert code" experience in an effort to provide more options (not just SAS code, which is most of what we get, but also Python, R, JSON, and other related code-like content).  "Insert Code" is just preformatted text, while "Insert SAS Code" applies a SAS language style for syntax coloring.  Also, sometimes people paste code in from other rich text environments (like Jupyter Notebook) and the formatting from the source is retained -- different than the options we provide natively in the message editor on community.

In addition to making posted code easier to read, proper tagging of code would allow easier machine translation (skipping the code sections, which you would not want to translate).  Our friends in the JMP community rely on this for their autotranslation feature (something we have not pursued here...yet).