[Python-ideas] Implicit String Concatenation (original) (raw)

Jim Jewett jimjjewett at gmail.com
Mon Apr 16 19:01:50 CEST 2007

On 4/13/07, Greg Ewing <greg.ewing at canterbury.ac.nz> wrote:

Josiah Carlson wrote:

>>Does anyone have a use case where they need >>the indentation to be preserved?

> Not personally. I think that telling people to > use textwrap.dedent() is sufficient.

But it seems crazy to make people do this all the time, when there's no reason not to do it automatically in the first place.

The textwrap methods (including a proposed dedent) might make useful string methods. Short of that

(1) Where does this preservation actually hurt?

def f(self, arg1):
    """My DocString ...

    And I continue here -- which really is what I want.
    """

I use docstrings online -- and I typically do want them indented like the code.

(2) Should literals (or at least strings, or at least docstrings) be decoratable? Anywhere but a docstring, you could just call the function, but ... I suppose it serves the same meta-value is the proposed i(nternational) or t(emplate) strings.

def f(...):
    ....
    @dedent
    """ ...
    ...
    """

-jJ

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