1. Formatting

1.1. Whitespace

  • Spaces are used to demarcate tokens in the language, although some keyword constructs may include spaces.

  • Multiple spaces and tabs are treated as single spaces and are otherwise irrelevant.

  • Indentation is irrelevant.

  • A command starts at the beginning of a line and a newline indicates the end of a command, except in special cases.

  • A newline will be Carriage Return ('\r' or 0xd), a Line Feed ('\n' or 0xa) or both ('\r\n') depending on the implementing system. This is only in regards to LOLCODE code itself, and does not indicate how these should be treated in strings or files during execution.

  • Multiple commands can be put on a single line if they are separated by a comma (','). In this case, the comma acts as a virtual newline or a soft-command-break.

  • A single-line comment is always terminated by a newline. Soft-command-breaks (',') after the comment (BTW) are ignored.

1.2. Comments

Single line comments are begun by BTW, and may occur either after a line of code, on a separate line:

HAI          BTW A single line comment
    VISIBLE "Hullo!"
             BTW Also a single line comment
KTHXBYE

Multi-line comments are begun by OBTW and ended with TLDR, and should be started on their own lines, or following a line of code after a line separator.

These are valid multi-line comments:

I HAS A VAR ITZ 12
        OBTW this is a long comment block
             see, i have more comments here
             and here
        TLDR
I HAS A FISH ITZ BOB

I HAS A VAR ITZ 12,  OBTW this is a long comment block
  see, i have more comments here
  and here
TLDR, I HAS A FISH ITZ BOB