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

[M.-A. Lemburg]

On 14.05.2013 19:24, Mark Dickinson wrote:
> On Sat, May 11, 2013 at 6:24 PM, M.-A. Lemburg <mal at egenix.com> 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.
>>> <snipped>
>>
> 
>> 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))
>>
> 
> Agreed.  I use the implicit concatenation a lot for exception messages like
> the one above; we also tend to keep line length to 80 characters *and* use
> nice verbose exception messages.  I could live with adding the extra '+'
> characters and parentheses, but I think it would be a net loss of
> readability.
> 
> The _litmonth example looks like a candidate for re.VERBOSE and a
> triple-quoted string, though.

It's taken out of context, just to demonstrate some real world
example of how long strings are broken down to handy 80 char
code lines.

The _litmonth variable is used as component to build other REs
and those typically also contain (important) whitespace,
so re.VERBOSE won't work.

-- 
Marc-Andre Lemburg
eGenix.com

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