[Python-ideas] New str whitespace cleaning method?

[Ron Adam]

On 05/24/2013 04:46 PM, Jim Jewett wrote:
> On Fri, May 24, 2013 at 4:06 PM, Wolfgang Maier
> <wolfgang.maier at biologie.uni-freiburg.de>  wrote:
>> >Triple-quoted strings could be made a subclass of str,
> Not really, but the new-prefix solution (d""" ... """) is a moral equivalent.

I don't care for dedent, (even with the 'd' prefix syntax.)  It only covers 
about 20% of the use cases that I care about.  Which is why I generally 
don't bother using it.

A much more useful alternative is to have a margin() method on strings that 
will take a width argument and works independent of the indent level the 
expression.  It's not a dedent, or indent, or maybe it's both. ;-)


     message = """\
         A simple paragraph
         of several
         lines.
         """.margin(2)

   A simple paragraph
   of several
   lines.


     message = """\
         A simple paragraph
         of several
         lines.
         """.margin(16)

                 A simple paragraph
                 of several
                 lines.


A margin method covers 90 percent of times I think about using dedent, and 
is geared more towards what I really need in those cases.


A margin of 0, gives us the dedent use.

     message = """\
         A simple paragraph
         of several
         lines.
         """.margin(0)

A simple paragraph
of several
lines.


And calling a margin() method multiple times gives predictable results.


You could use textwraps TextWrapper class with it's initial_indent() and 
subsequent_indent(), along with dedent() to do the same things as above. 
But it's a lot of work for simple cases like these.

Cheers,
     Ron