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

[Ron Adam]

On 07/01/2013 05:52 AM, Markus Unterwaditzer wrote:
> I rather want to write code that looks a lot more like this:
>
> def foo():
>      return """
>          look at me
>              i am cool
>          i can do indentation
>      """
>
> So the first line would have four spaces at the beginning, the second eight,
> the third four again. The "\n" character after "indentation" would be the
> last character in the string.


Currently to get what you want you need to use both dedent and indent.

 >>> print(indent(dedent("""
...         look at me
...             I am cool
...         I can do indentation
...      """), prefix="    "))

     look at me
         I am cool
     I can do indentation


Since indent is already in textwrap and works differently, I think 'margin' 
would be a good method name to set the left margin.

def foo():
     return """\
         look at me
             i am cool
         i can do dedent.
         """.margin(4)

I think this fits a much more common usage pattern, and we won't need to 
add two methods to do what you want here.

A dedent method could take a 'margin' argument..

     s.dedent(margin=4)

But I prefer just calling it margin.

Cheers,
    Ron