[Python-ideas] Implicit string literal concatenation considered harmful?

[Christian Tismer]

On 11.05.13 19:24, M.-A. Lemburg wrote:
> On 11.05.2013 19:05, Christian Tismer wrote:
>> I think a simple stripping of white-space in
>>
>>      text = s"""
>>        leftmost column
>>          two-char indent
>>        """
>>
>> would solve 95 % of common indentation and concatenation cases.
>> I don't think provision for merging is needed very often.
>> If text occurs deeply nested in code, then it is also quite likely to
>> be part of an expression, anyway.
>> My major use-case is text constants in a class or function that
>> is multiple lines long and should be statically ready to use without
>> calling a function.
>>
>> (here an 's' as a strip prefix, but I'm not sold on that)
> This is not a good solution for long lines where you don't want to
> have embedded line endings. Taken from existing code:
>
> _litmonth = ('(?P<litmonth>'
>               'jan|feb|mar|apr|may|jun|jul|aug|sep|oct|nov|dec|'
>               'mär|mae|mrz|mai|okt|dez|'
>               'fev|avr|juin|juil|aou|aoû|déc|'
>               'ene|abr|ago|dic|'
>               'out'
>               ')[a-z,\.;]*')
>
> or
>                      raise errors.DataError(
>                          'Inconsistent revenue item currency: '
>                          'transaction=%r; transaction_position=%r' %
>                          (transaction, transaction_position))
>
> We usually try to keep the code line length under 80 chars,
> so splitting literals in that way is rather common, esp. in
> nested code paths.
>

Your first example is a regex, which could be used as-is.

Your second example is indented five levels deep. That is a coding
style which I would propose to write differently for better readability.
And if you stick with it, why not use the "+"?

I want to support constant strings, which should not be somewhere
in the middle of code. Your second example is computed, anyway,
not the case that I want to solve.

cheers - chris

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