Re: multiline strings and proper indentation/alignment

Gary John Salerno wrote:

How do you make a single string span multiple lines, but also allow yourself to indent the second (third, etc.) lines so that it lines up where you want it, without causing the newlines and tabs or spaces to be added to the string as well?

Example (pretend this is all on one line):

self.DTD = '<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN"\n"http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd";>\n\n'

I want it to read:

self.DTD = '''<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN"\n
"http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd";>\n\n'''

Or anything like that, but I don't want the extra newline or tabs to be a part of the string when it's printed.

Thanks.


The textwrap module has a function to do just the thing you want.

*dedent*( text)

Remove any whitespace that can be uniformly removed from the left of
every line in text.

This is typically used to make triple-quoted strings
line up with the left edge of screen/whatever, while still
presenting it in the source code in indented form.

Gary Herron


.

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