Noam Raphael wrote:
Sorry, I didn't mean to mislead. I wrote "easily" - I guess using the current textwrap.dedent isn't really hard, but still, writing:
import textwrap ...
r = some_func(textwrap.dedent('''\ line1 line2'''))
Seems harder to me than simply
r = some_func('''\ line1 line2'''.dedent())
I think a better argument for this is that dedenting a literal string is more of a syntactic operation than a functional one. You don't think "oh, I bet I'll need to do some dedenting on line 200 of this module, I better import textwrap". Instead you start writing a long string literal once you get to line 200. You can do it a few ways: some_func("line1\nline2") some_func("line1\n" "line2") some_func("""\ line1 line2""") # If nice whitespace would be pretty but not required: some_func(""" line1 line2""") I often do that last one with HTML and SQL. In practice textwrap.dedent() isn't one of the ways you are likely to write this statement. At least I've never done it that way (and I hit the issue often), and I don't think I've seen code that has used that in this circumstance. Additionally I don't think textwrapping has anything particular to do with dedenting, except perhaps that both functions were required when that module was added. I guess I just find the import cruft at the top of my files a little annoying, and managing them rather tedious, so saying that you should import textwrap because it makes a statement deep in the file look a little prettier is unrealistic. At the same time, the forms that don't use it are rather ugly or sloppy. -- Ian Bicking | ianb@colorstudy.com | http://blog.ianbicking.org