Are docstring content-types standard or not?

[bursauxa]

Hello,

The documentation on doc strings mentions that doc string delimiters must exclusively be triple quotes:

The text should be offset by delimiters consisting of three double-quote marks on lines of their own

On the other hand, the documentation from Relish allows for adding content types to doc strings, in markdown style:

It's possible to annotate the DocString with the type of content it contains. [...] You specify the content type after the triple quote

We are having a debate about this in our team right now, because of down-to-earth tooling issues:

• 👈 some of us use VS Code and its Cucumber plugin which strictly follows the first specification (its autoformat feature can auto-detect json content in docstrings and indent the docstring accordingly, but will break on any docstring with explicit content type)
• 👉 others use IntelliJ which relies on explicit content types, and will treat anything not explicitly annotated as raw strings (hence no auto-indentation of content).

[mpkorstanje]

1. Content types on doc strings are standard and part of the gherkin test test set.
2. The bits of documentation you are quoting are not contradicting each other, rather the cucumber.io docs are incomplete.
3. You may want to file a bug report with VSCode to also support explicit content types.

[mpkorstanje]

If anybody is interested in amending the documentation feel free to do so.

[bursauxa]

Thanks for the answer, I did as you suggested @mpkorstanje and reported the issue to the VS Code extension.