Editing code in question

Question

I frequently answer questions on the python tag and one thing that happens (all the time) is that code is not correctly indented. In python, the indenting of code blocks matters:

if foo:
bar()
elif other_foo:
other_bar()

is a SyntaxError. In this case, it is completely obvious that the user meant to do:

if foo:
   bar()
elif other_foo:
   other_bar()

The question isn't about getting a SyntaxError, it's about something else, so it's pretty clear that this is just a copy/paste problem and not knowing how to clearly format code on SO. Here's the question -- with the plethora of statements here on Meta about NEVER EDIT CODE IN A QUESTION, does that apply to this as well? To fix it, I would do nothing other than format the code so that it produces the behavior that is mentioned in the rest of the question.

Of course, indenting of code is just an example. mis-spelled variable names are another thing which I see occasionally.

My current policy is to leave a comment asking the OP to fix the problem. Is that the correct way to go about this, or should I edit?

Answer 1

I routinely edit code for appearance only. By that I mean I won't change formatting that the user intended to have, but I will often edit a question to fix markdown problems. For example, if a "#" appears at the beginning of a line and gets turned into a headline, I'll fix that. Or if extra blank lines break a code sample up, or one line isn't indented enough and breaks a sample up, I'll fix those.

I think syntactically significant whitespace as in Python could fall under this category, but be careful. Sometimes a user's bad formatting could actually be causing the code to be misinterpreted, and you wouldn't want to accidentally change the meaning of the code.