F8 should Support Here String

[sunliangqin]

I have a PowerShell code snippet like below.

Write-Output @"
Hello
World
"@

Current Behavior

I put the cursor at the end of the first line. Press F8 (PowerShell.RunSelection). This is what I see in the integration console.

Expected Behavior

The PowerShell extension should recognize the here string and run all lines when F8 is pressed.

[corbob]

Iirc F8 is implemented almost entirely in typescript. If there is a selection it takes just the selected text and passed it to psic. If there is no selection is asks the editor for the line it's on and passes that.

I imagine to implement this it would need to parse the line and determine if it needs to continue, then as it continues it would need to know what the terminating character(s) are and stop after them. As simple as it sounds, I imagine we'd want to do this for { and ``` and | and so on... And if we do it for `{` how do we determine the stopping point? Is it the next `}`? What if there's nested pairs? Or what if there's an else right after it? It seems to me that it starts getting complicated quickly.

Add to this that it's a significant change in behavior that might throw some people off. Like if there are people who rely on the current behavior to preload something into the terminal and then type the rest out (for some reason I don't understand).

[MartinGC94]

I'm not seeing the behavior the OP is describing but the behavior does seem broken in newer PS versions. This is what I see if I'm in a PS 7.2 preview session:

It prints the prompt twice on the same line and nothing else happens.
If I do the same in a 5.1 session I'm seeing an error like I would expect:

[sunliangqin]

@MartinGC94 Thanks for pointing this out. Sorry, I forget to mention that I set the setting "powershell.integratedConsole.showOnStartup to false to stop the integrated console form showing. I always have the "Standard" PowerShell console running. With this setting, the selected commands will be sent to the Standard PowerShell console instead of the integrated one.

@corbob Thank you for sharing your thoughts. Yes, this definitely requires some sort of syntax analysis. However, I have two observations make me believe that the PowerShell extension already has this capability.

1. I can place a break point on any of them. The debugger will always stop at the first line. And Press F10, all of them will be executed as one single command.
2. Vscode allows users to fold the here string.
   

Good call on the behavior change issue. I think we could provide a setting enables users to switch between the two behaviors.

[msftrncs]

@sunliangqin, debugging is handled by PowerShell running in the integrated console, so that is not a function of the extension. The extension asked PowerShell to stop on a line, but PowerShell determined that line was in the middle of a statement.

Folding of the Here-String is handled by VS Code, using folding signals (surrounding auto closing pairs), for which @" and "@ are the signals. The PowerShell extension is not even required for this behavior.

This conversation does bring up a point about how the integrated console behaves differently than a standard PowerShell console.