Is it possible to display whitespace in output?

[richardhboyd]

I'm working on creating some sample code that is heavily commented (as a teaching tool) and rustfmt was unhappy with trailing whitespace when I was using // on a line by itself to break up long blocks of text. the output showed

         // Payload: The response from the function, or an error object.
-        // 
+        //
         // For our example, we are just going to interact with the payload
         // portion of the response
         Ok(resp) => {

Which is rather confusing until you copy/paste the response and examine that one contains a space and the other doesn't. Would it be possible for rustfmt to identify this whitespace in some way? maybe like with the little dots that some IDEs use?

[calebcartwright]

Thanks for reaching out! I'd be open to anything that provides more visual cues in these cases, but to be fully transparent doing so is a very low priority. Part of the challenge is that highlighting spacing can produce some very noisy/difficult to process diffs when you consider the entire realm of formatting changes beyond the simple trailing whitespace trim case shared in the description

There's a lot of other considerations that would fall under this bucket as well, such as conversions between tab and space characters, newline styles, etc.

[richardhboyd]

Understandable. I didn't see an Issue for it so I figured I'd open one to track it. I think If I had read the docs before using rustfmt I probably wouldn't have been caught up by this.