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The answer to this question of whether you should use Doxygen or not depends upon the language you are writing your code in. Putting this code through Doxygen and choosing HTML as output gives me documentation that looks like this! Doxygen output screenshot Is Doxygen the right choice for you? so that they can be displayed in formats like HTML, Hyperlinked PDF, etc. When you run Doxygen, this tool will parse out the documentation details from comments which follow the special Doxygen syntax. Here I have used the 3 slashes syntax to document the global variable and the “ /**….*/ “ syntax to document the function. What is an entity in Doxygen? An entity can be a global variable, a structure declaration, enum declaration or a function.Ĭonsider the code snippet below written in C programming Language.Ĭhar * hello = 'Hello Embedded Inventors!' The above 2 syntaxes must be placed just above an entity so that the Doxygen parser can associate the comments to that particular entity.

These syntaxes are used to tell the Doxygen parser that it is documentation and it needs to be extracted. Note the extra asterisk (*) in line 1 of the first option and extra slash symbol(/), i.e. The 2 simplest methods to include in C source code are Doxygen tags and symbols to use in your commentsĭoxygen supports several methods for incorporating documentation inside the comments.

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The next logical question that comes into mind is how can we use Doxygen to make our jobs of producing documentation easier? How to use Doxygen?Īs we saw in the short version of the answer, Doxygen works by taking the comments which are specifically formatted according to Doxygen’s syntax.ĭoxygen calls these special syntaxes as “Tags”.

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Hence the only way out for us is to automate this process somehow so that we spend less time doing this tedious task at the same time we get the results that we need!ĭoxygen is a software specifically made to fulfill the need for producing and maintaining documentation with as little effort as possible. Hence us developers came to the understanding that Software has a life time of years, sometimes decades.

Even if we did, if we leave the project and someone else has to take over our job, then they will have a very hard time with our code without any documentation!.

We will never remember what we wrote a couple of years ago.

This sort of thinking has the following 2 issues. Hence to avoid this task, we tend to tell ourselves that we don’t really need documentation, as we will remember everything.

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When we make any changes to the source code, nobody has enough patience to go over to the documentation and update them, hence we go into the procrastinate/forget about that mindset!.

It is very difficult for us to go back and try to make documentation of something they did a few months ago.

Software developers like us hate doing tedious tasks like writing documentation.

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For professional software developers, the time to document their source codes used to be their least favorite time of the project! If you are interested in a particular topic, you can skip to that using the table of contents below, but I recommend reading the entire article, as the 5 to 10mins you spend reading this article will give you a good understanding of the software, so that you will feel right at home when you start using it.īefore there was Doxygen, there was chaos when it comes to maintaining documentation.

If yes, then how to get started using Doxygen?.

If no, then what are the alternatives available?.

That is just the short version of the answer, read on for a longer and more informative answer where I try to answer the following questions

How Doxygen works? Doxygen works by taking the comments which are specifically formatted according to Doxygen’s syntax, when you run this tool, it will parse out the documentation details from comments which follow the special Doxygen syntax. and delivers in various formats like HTML, PDF, etc. What is Doxygen? Doxygen is a software used to produce documentation of source code written in C, C++, Python, Java, etc. In this article let us learn about the Documentation Software Doxygen and learn how it works.įor those of you in a hurry, here is the short version of the answer. If you are a beginner to the programming world and you have just heard about the software named Doxygen and was wondering what it is, then this article is for you!

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