[Python-ideas] Idea for new multi-line triple quote literal

[Steven D'Aprano]

Hi nbv4, and welcome.

On 01/07/13 10:32, nbv4 wrote:
> The tripple quote string literal is a great feature, but there is one
> problem. When you use them, it forces you to break out of you're current
> indentation which maks code look ugly. I propose a new way to define a
> triple back quote that woks the same way regular triple quotes work, but
> instead does some simple parsing of the data within the quotes to preserve
> the flow of the code. Due to the brittle and sometimes ambigious nature of
> anything 'automatic', this feature is obviously not meant for data where
> exact white space is needed. It would be great for docstrings, exception
> messages and other type text.
>
> Here is a short example of it's usage:
> https://gist.github.com/priestc/5897602


For something as trivial as the example you give, there is no need to send people off to a website, which they may not have access too. Here's the simplified version:

# Proposed syntax
def func():
     s = """line 1
     line 2
     line 3"""
     t = ---line 1
     line 2
     line 3---
     return s, t

The difference being, lines 2 and 3 of s will begin with four spaces, while t reduces the whitespace between lines to a single space:

s == 'line 1\n    line 2\n    line 3'
t == 'line 1 line 2 line 3'

I don't think this is particularly useful. I would be more interested in it if it kept the newlines but got rid of the leading spaces:

t == 'line 1\nline 2\nline 3'


but in either case, I think the choice of --- as delimiter is ugly and arbitrary, and very likely is ambiguous (currently, x = ---1 is legal code). Similar suggestions to this have been made many times before, you should search the archives:

http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-ideas


Regards,



-- 
Steven