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

[Nick Coghlan]

On 1 July 2013 11:09, Steven D'Aprano <steve at pearwood.info> wrote:
> 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

I'm still partial to the idea of offering textwrap.indent() and
textwrap.dedent() as string methods.

1. You could add a ".dedent()" at the end of a triple quoted string
for this kind of problem. For a lot of code, the runtime cost isn't an
issue.
2. A JIT would definitely be able to avoid recalculating the result every time
3. Even CPython may eventually gain constant folding for that kind of
method applied directly to a string literal
4. I dedent and indent long strings more often than I capitalize,
center, tab expand, or perform various other operations which already
grace the str type as methods.

Cheers,
Nick.

--
Nick Coghlan   |   ncoghlan at gmail.com   |   Brisbane, Australia