New Announcement in this forum

Question

I just saw, that Jan created a new announcement on top of this forum. Good !
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If you have java code to display on the forum, surround it with tags and the output formatter will format the code for you with syntax highlighting and with indentation intact. See thread Re: Where can I find the JAR-File of the JDAPI-demo FormDumper ? for an example.
It works for PLSQL code as well.

Answer 1

Good thread! And good announcement, Jan.
Here are a few comments:
What is an "empty b tag"?
Here's how I do it:  When I post a message that includes ampersand characters such as the &amp91; for the [, and then go back and edit the message, the board software screws up the ampersands.   In order to preserve them, [u]every time I edit the message, I must add "amp;" after the ampersand, so it looks like this: &  If I don't, the [code] turns into an active tag.  The best way to get it right is to copy my message into a simple editor, and make corrections there, then paste it back into this board's edit window.    …so you can see why the "empty b tag" sounds good.
As for history of where we learned the methods:   Francois learned of it <a href=http://forums.oracle.com/forums/message.jspa?messageID=960521#960521 target=_new>here.</a>  And I learned about it from Andrew P Clarke  (exactly 4 years ago) <a href=http://forums.oracle.com/forums/message.jspa?messageID=546435#546435 target=_new>here.</a>
And incidentally, that code formatting feature failed <a href=http://forums.oracle.com/forums/message.jspa?messageID=1387245#1387245 target=_new>for a time last year.</a>
Jan, I think you could clean up that announcement.  You show the second code as /code\.  But there should be no trailing backslash.  And now that you know how to edit and maintain those square brackets, you could show it as &#91;code&#93;...&#91;/code&#93;
Thanks! [nobr]