Enhancing Code Readability through Automated Consistent Formatting

Abstract

Code readability is critical to software development and has a significant impact on maintenance and collaboration in evolving technology landscapes. With the increasing complexity of projects and the diversity of developers’ coding styles, the need for automated tools to improve code readability has become more apparent. This paper presents an innovative automated system designed to improve code readability by modeling and enforcing consistent formatting standards. The approach uses techniques such as Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks and N-gram models, allowing the system to adapt to different coding styles and preferences. The system works autonomously by analyzing code styling within a project, identifying deviations from established standards and providing actionable recommendations for consistent styling. To validate our approach, several evaluations were performed on a large dataset of Java files. The results demonstrate the system’s effectiveness in detecting and correcting formatting errors, identifying a formatting error within the first five predictions more than 90% of the time, while providing the correct fix nearly 96% of the time, regardless of formatting convention or programming language. By offering a solution tailored to the specific needs of different teams, our system represents a significant advance in automated code formatting and readability improvement.