PowerShell cmdlet multi-line code documentation and line wrapping

Question

I have some PowerShell cmdlets for which I've created in-code documentation. All works fine except for one thing. If I have a long description for any of the documentation sections I'm splitting it into multiple lines so that it can be easily read from code. However I've noticed that those new line characters are then also represented as new lines in the PowerShell system.

As an example, here's part of the documentation

.PARAMETER MyParam
    This parameter has a long documentation that does not fit into single line,
    so I'm breaking it down to several lines.

Now once I run Get-Help on a cmdlet that contains this sort of comments I'll get something like.

    -MyParam [<SwitchParameter>]
        This parameter has a long documentation that does not fit
        into single line,
        so I'm breaking it down to several lines.

        Required?                    true
        Position?                    named
        Default value                False
        Accept pipeline input?       false
        Accept wildcard characters?  false

Notice that the first line gets wrapped correctly, but then the second line (starting with the word so) also starts on a new line.

I could overcome this problem by putting my whole documentation block in one line but that wouldn't be too good for readability point of view.

Is there a way to treat the whole documentation block as it was part of the same text block but have the comments organized into multiple lines at the same time? Any way that I could tell in the documentation that I don't intend to make a new paragraph and I want to continue previous one?

Answer 1

I don't think this is possible apart from preprocessing help strings with external script.

Use word-wrap in your editor and keep everything on the one line. Keep a hotkey accessible for WW so you can quickly switch from one line to block of text when you need to edit it. Some editors (such as vim) are extremely good in navigating wrapped text (basically the same as it is not wrapped).