On Fri, Nov 5, 2010 at 11:10 AM, Stephen J. Turnbull stephen@xemacs.org wrote:
> To me, this is rather ugly because it messes up the indentation of > some_func(). Suppose we could have a multiline string, that when started on > a line indented four spaces, ignores the first four spaces on each line of > the literal when creating the actual string? I don't think the function call is ugly enough to fix with syntax.
I do use the textwrap.dedent workaround myself, but I think it is sufficiently flawed for a proper fix to be worth considering:
1. It doesn't work for docstrings (as Tal pointed out) 2. It postpones until runtime an operation that could fairly easily be carried out at compile time instead
Note that a method on str objects fixes none of those problems, so isn't much of a gain from this point of view. As new string prefix would handle the task nicely, though. I personally like "d for dedent", with all d-strings (even single-quoted ones) being implicitly multiline as the colour for that particular bikeshed:
def some_func(): x, y = process_something()
val = d"\ <xml> <myThing> <val>%s</val> <otherVal>%s</otherVal> </myThing> </xml> ") % (x, y)
return val
I'm no more than +0 on the idea though. It strikes me as an awful lot of effort in implementing, documenting and promoting the idea for something that provides at best a minimal improvement in aesthetics and performance.
Cheers, Nick.