Including Code Inline

The following commands are used to render source code without formatting. The source code begins on a new line, rendered in the code.

\code

The \code and \endcode commands enclose a snippet of source code.

For documenting command-line instructions, shell scripts, or any content that is not in a Qt language recognized by QDoc, use \badcode instead.

When processing the \code command, QDoc removes all indentation that is common for the verbatim code blocks within a /*! ... */ comment before it adds the standard indentation.

/*!
    \code
        #include <QApplication>
        #include <QPushButton>

        int main(int argc, char *argv[])
        {
            ...
        }
    \endcode
*/

QDoc renders this as:

#include <QApplication>
#include <QPushButton>

int main(int argc, char *argv[])
{
    ...
}

Other QDoc commands are disabled within \code... \endcode, and the special character '\' is accepted and rendered like the rest of the code, unless it is followed by a digit and parameters were passed to \code.

Highlighting and autolinking

The \code commands attempts to parse its contents as code of a specific language, as defined in the the language configuration variable. This provides highlighting and automatic linking to types detected in the code.

As an exception since QDoc version 6.4, when the \code command is used within a QML-specific topic, QDoc first attempts to recognize the code as QML; for other topics, the language configuration variable takes precedence. To explicitly mark the code snippet as QML, use the \qml command instead.

Code snippet parameters

Since QDoc version 5.12, \code command accepts also optional parameters. Parameters are useful for injecting simple strings into the code snippet. To inject a string to a specific location in the snippet, add a backslash followed by a digit (1..8). The digits correspond with the order of the argument list, where arguments are separated by spaces.

For example:

/*!
    \code * hello
    /\1 \2 \1/
    \endcode
*/

For the above snippet, QDoc renders the word hello enclosed in a C-style comment.

Including code from external files

To include code snippets from an external file, use the \snippet and \codeline commands.

See also \c, \qml, \badcode, \quotefromfile, and language.

\badcode

Similar to \code, \badcode and \endcode commands enclose content that is rendered verbatim in a separate paragraph, but no parsing or automatic link creation is performed. Instead, the content is treated as plain text.

Substitute \code with this command when documenting command-line instructions, shell scripts or any other content that is not in a Qt language, but should still be styled similarly to a \code paragraph.

Like \code, \badcode accepts also optional parameters.

\qml

The \qml and \endqml commands enclose a snippet of QML source code. Use these for proper syntax highlighting of QML code snippets. The enclosed snippet must be complete as if it was a valid .qml file. If the snippet is incomplete, QDoc will issue a warning and ignore the snippet.

/*!
    \qml
        import QtQuick 2.0

        Row {
            Rectangle {
                width: 100; height: 100
                color: "blue"
                transform: Translate { y: 20 }
            }
            Rectangle {
                width: 100; height: 100
                color: "red"
                transform: Translate { y: -20 }
            }
        }
    \endqml
*/

QDoc renders this as:

import QtQuick 2.0

Row {
    Rectangle {
        width: 100; height: 100
        color: "blue"
        transform: Translate { y: 20 }
    }
    Rectangle {
        width: 100; height: 100
        color: "red"
        transform: Translate { y: -20 }
    }
}

Like the \code command, \qml accepts optional parameters.