Eclipse 3.7 formatting static in class

Question

In Eclipse 3.7 is code:

public class AppResources
{
    private static Image titleIcon;
    static
    {
        AppResources.titleIcon = getIconImage();
    }

    public static Image getTitleIcon()
    {
        return AppResources.titleIcon;
    }
}

Where in Formatter is possible to say that before static should be empty line?

Answer 1

There is no separate formatting setting for the static block. For formatting purposes it appears to be treated as any other member variable (as opposed to a function or some other construct).

There is another way to end up with the formatting you want though. If you set the formatting option Blank Lines->Existing Blank Lines->Number of empty lines to preserve to be 1, then you can manually add a blank line before the static block and the formatter will not remove it.

Answer 2

As other answers point out, this is not possible to do for static blocks through the Eclipse formatter. One other way to accomplish this would be through search/replace in File Search in Eclipse:

From:

(^\s*\n)*(^\s*static\s*\{)

To:

\n\2

with Regular Expression enabled