It seems to me that there are an awful lot of posts that get botched for lack of code tags. Naturally, there are none in Nodes To Consider at the moment, but there are always some such posts around.

I thought that a fairly simple heuristic could be added to the posting feature to look for likely code chunks, and if there are no code tags around them, give a "Woah there!" message that suggests maybe they want to wrap code tags around some of their post.

I present the heuristics I thought of in Jeff Foxworthy format. If you have better ideas or reasons these aren't a good idea, discuss.

You might need code tags if...

Caution: Contents may have been coded under pressure.

In reply to Code tags warning by Roy Johnson

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.