I am trying to get Ford to emit a project.json file so I can inspect this for, for instance, all todo instances. Copilot tells me to use
Output_format = [html,json]
But this does not seem to produce a .json file anywhere, the output file .txt does not report an error or warning, and the current readthedocs does not mention “output_format”.
What do I try next?
Thanks
I did not try it myself but looking at the source code, it seems like there is a `–externalize` switch in the external projects group that outputs a json file.
I’m afraid Ford currently does not collate todos from across the project.
What it can do, that @davidpfister points out, is collect information about entities (functions, modules, and so on) that can then be used by other projects. See the docs for a bit more detail.
@davidpfister & @zedthree Thanks, I had read the docs, and could not find “output_format”, but it is fascinating, and possibly infuriating for the developers, that copilot has insisted that output_format does exist. I wonder if this is a legacy version of Ford, or perhaps copilot has extrapolated from other documentation systems (not necessarily for Fortran). I think I shall have to scan the source code for myself. The tool I am/was building was going to assemble a list of todos, sort and categorise them and then post them to Trello via its API.
FWIW, doxygen has a @todo command. You can output an xml and parse it for later use.
@davidpfister Ha! Yes! I am startng to use Ford because, as a 20 year Doxygen user, I have given up waiting for submodule support. I was also attracted to Ford partly because of copilots insistence that the project.json file would allow me to aggregate todos into a form that could be transmitted onwards to Trello or similar. But now I can rise to the challenge of writing my own todo extractor!
