Fix 'Squiz.WhiteSpace.LanguageConstructSpacing' coding standard

Part of meta-issue #2571965: [meta] Fix PHP coding standards in core

Step 1: Preparation

Open the file core/phpcs.xml.dist and add a line for the sniff of this ticket. The sniff name is in the issue title. Make sure your patch will include the addition of this line.

Step 2: Install & configure PHPCS

Install PHP CodeSniffer and the ruleset from the Coder module:

$ composer install

Once you have installed the phpcs package, you can list all the sniffs available to you like this:

$ ./vendor/bin/phpcs --standard=Drupal -e

This will give you a big list of sniffs, and the Drupal-based ones should be present.

Step 3: Prepare the phpcs.xml file

To speed up the testing you should make a copy of the file phpcs.xml.dist (in the core/ folder) and save it as phpcs.xml. This is the configuration file for PHP CodeSniffer.

We only want this phpcs.xml file to specify the sniff we're interested in. So we need to remove all the rule items, and add only our own sniff's rule. Rule items look like this:

<rule ref="Drupal.Classes.UnusedUseStatement"/>

Remove all of them, and add only the sniff from this issue title. This will make sure that our tests run quickly, and are not going to contain any output from unrelated sniffs.

Step 4: Run the test

Now you are ready to run the test! From root folder run the following command to launch the test:

$ composer run --timeout 600 phpcs -- -ps --standard=core/phpcs.xml

This takes a couple of minutes. The -p flag shows the progress, so you have a bunch of nice dots to look at while it is running.

Step 5: Fix the failures

When the test is complete it will present you a list of all the files that contain violations of your sniff, and the line numbers where the violations occur. You could fix all of these manually, but thankfully phpcbf can fix many of them. You can call phpcbf like this:

$ composer run phpcbf

This will fix the errors in place. You can then make a diff of the changes using git. You can also re-run the test with phpcs and determine if that fixed all of them.