-2- trimming of indentation
On my computer, calling the following function: def write(): if True: print """To be or not to be, that is the question.""" results in the following output: |To be or not to be, | that is the question. This is certainly not the programmer's intent. To get what is expected, one should write instead: def write(): if True: print """To be or not to be, that is the question.""" ...which distorts the visual presentation of code by breaking correct indentation. To have a multiline text written on multiple lines and preserve indentation, one needs to use more complicated forms like: def write(): if True: print "To be or not to be,\n" + \ "that is the question." (Actually, the '+' can be here omitted, but this fact is not commonly known.)
Have you heard of textwrap.dedent()? I usually would write this as: def write(): if True: print textwrap.dedent("""\ To be or not to be, that is the question.""") - Tal