trim()

[Chuck Esterbrook]

I think this is pretty cool. I could use this for the CGI scripts I'm writing where I often have indented HTML. It ends up being indented in the final result which not only looks bad but takes up more bandwidth.

Thanks,

-Chuck


"Michal Wallace (sabren)" wrote:

> Hey all,
>
>   I posted a couple days ago about actually needing a whitespace-eating
> nanovirus.. And ever since I built it, I've been using it almost every
> day for text processing... Being able to indent triple-quoted-string
> is a really really nice feature:
>
> def test():
>
>     output = textmuncher(trim("""
>     this is
>         some
>      input
>     text
>     """))
>
>     goal = trim("""
>     this is
>         some expected
>     output  text
>     """)
>
>     assert goal == output, "test failed"
>
> Anyway, I was wondering if anyone else ever has need of that particular
> capability. I think it's useful enough to go into the string module, and
> I was just debating whether or not to submit it...  here's the code:
>
> def trim(s):
>     """strips leading indentation from a multi-line string."""
>     lines = string.split(s, "\n")
>
>     # strip leading blank line
>     if lines[0] == "":
>         lines = lines[1:]
>
>     # strip indentation
>     indent = len(lines[0]) - len(string.lstrip(lines[0]))
>     for i in range(len(lines)):
>         lines[i] = lines[i][indent:]
>
>     return string.join(lines, "\n")
>
> .. I guess it probably ought to run expandtabs(), too, but.. well..
> what do you think?
>
> Cheers,
>
> - Michal
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