On Sat, Mar 31, 2018 at 04:50:03PM +0200, Marius Räsener wrote: [...]
What I have in mind is probably best described with an Example:
print(""" I am a multiline String. """)
the closing quote defines the "margin indentation" - so in this example all lines would get reduces by their leading 4 spaces, resulting in a "clean" and unintended string.
Backwards compatibility rules this out. I have many strings that intentionally include indents and you will annoy me no end if you make those indents disappear :-) But having said that, for every one of those, I have a lot more where the indents are annoying. I either outdent the lines: def spam(): text = """some text another line and a third one """ print(text) or I use implicit string concatenation: def spam(): text = ("some text\n" "another line\n" "and a third\n") print(text) neither of which I'm really happy with. The ideal solution would: - require only a single pair of starting/ending string delimiters; - allow string literals to be indented to the current block, for the visual look and to make it more convenient with editors which automatically indent; - evaluate without the indents; - with no runtime cost. One solution is to add yet another string prefix, let's say d for dedent, but as Terry and others point out, that leads to a combinational explosion with f-strings and r-strings already existing. Another possibility is to make dedent a string method: def spam(): text = """\ some text another line and a third """.dedent() print(text) and avoid the import of textwrap. However, that also imposes a runtime cost, which could be expensive if you are careless: for x in seq: for y in another_seq: process("""/ some large indented string """.dedent() ) (Note: the same applies to using textwrap.dedent.) But we could avoid that runtime cost if the keyhole optimizer performed the dedent at compile time: triple-quoted string literal .dedent() could be optimized at compile-time, like other constant-folding. Out of all the options, including the status quo, the one I dislike the least is the last one: - make dedent a string method; - recommend (but don't require) that implementations perform the dedent of string literals at compile time; (failure to do so is a quality of implementation issue, not a bug) - textwrap.dedent then becomes a thin wrapper around the string method. Thoughts? -- Steve