What is the purpose of using square brackets in Java code comment?

Question

I saw some Java code by Google using square bracket in comment.
For example:

// [START initialize_auth]
mAuth = FirebaseAuth.getInstance();
// [END initializ         


        

Answer 1

Probably they are using square brackets to match a set of characters for further reference. Internal tools used to automate the coding standard.

Answer 2

These snippets are linkers for the Firebase documentation.

You can click the class names on the Firebase site, and you will be taken to the corresponding block of the example code.

Hard to say if that is dynamically generated HTML, but there is no such special syntax for those comments in pure Java

Same question, but for iOS: What is this Objective-C/XCode annotation // [START_EXCLUDE]

Answer 3

Everyone has their own comment style, but in regards to your question specifically it could be a way to organize large codebases or search through code faster.