(When I posted this to reddit, someone pointed out that I could have gotten the same information from c-show-syntactic-information by hitting C-c C-s. Awesome!)
I was getting irritated by emacs refusing to indent PHP code properly when I was working on a MediaWiki extension. I’ve run into this before, but, today, in order to procrastinate a little, I ran into it again with the following code:
try { $object->method( ARG ); }
It kept trying to put $object the same level as try, so it would end up with:
try { $object->method( ARG ); }
So I chased it down. I used C-h k to find the function being called. After a bit of edebug, I found that the code in the function c-indent-line being called was essentially:
(c-get-syntactic-indentation (c-guess-basic-syntax))
In fact, doing M-; (c-get-syntactic-indentation (c-guess-basic-syntax)) RET when point was sitting on $ gave the result 4 when it tried to indent and 0 when it didn’t.
(Ok, the code had two more levels of indention than the above, so it was giving 12 and 8, but let’s not get carried away with details.)
Now, running M-x php-mode RET (i.e. none of the added configuration in .dir-locals.el) gave the proper indention. In my .dir-locals.el, though, I had set up a c-offsets-alist that mostly worked with bits and pieces copied from all over.
Running just M-; (c-guess-basic-syntax) RET returned ((statement-block-intro 1379)) so I figured I needed to add (statement-block-intro . +) to my c-offsets-list.
I added that, and it worked. And now I know how to chase down indention bugs.
(Header image by Ivo Kruusamägi [CC BY-SA 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons.)
