Sending block of codes behaves differently in Python script with cell and without cell

[Fred-Wu]

Positron: 2024.07.0-15
OS: MacOS

Without cell:

Only CTRL+ENTER works, and works when placing cursor anywhere in the block

However, with cell:
Both CTRL+ENTER and SHIFT+ENTER work, but behave differently

SHIFT+ENTER works when placing the cursor anywhere in the block, but NOT CTRL+ENTER (it only works when placing the cursor in the beginning of the block)

CTRL+ENTER

[juliasilge]

Yep, similar to #3908, this is currently behaving as designed/expected but we are happy to hear feedback about what you were expecting or would prefer.

Shift+Enter is a keyboard shortcut specific to code cells to run the whole code cell. There is a whole set of keyboard shortcuts specific to these kinds of cells:

Similar to what I outline in #3908, the keyboard shortcut to execute the current statement looks for the immediate current complete statement. We do have some open questions about Python statement detection in #3464 if you'd like to add your experiences and preferences there.

[petetronic]

It looks like though that there is an issue with code block detection? Opening for RC?

[seeM]

@petetronic yes it looks like there's a bug with our fallback regex-based detector. Here's a simple repro:

1. Write this to a file:

   x = # this line is to intentionally create a syntax error so that we fall back to the regex-based detector
   y = [
       0,
   ]

2. Place the cursor on the 0, line and press Cmd+Enter.

3. Only the line 0, gets sent to the console.

It should send the entire y definition to the console.

Note that it works as expected without the x = syntax error.

Possible solutions

We can try to look into fixing this case for the regex-based detector. I wonder though if we should consider moving the AST-based detector to a parser that supports syntax errors (originally raised this here).

I haven't looked into all of the options, but I know that parso (used by Jedi and maintained by the same person) does support error recovery.