Automatic reformatting of triple-quoted strings (was Re: Few things)

[Nick Coghlan]

Carlos Ribeiro wrote:
> The idea is as follows:
> 
> 1) triple-quote strings will automatically be reformatted to remove
> any extra space on the left side due to indentation. The indentation
> will be controled by the position of the leftmost non-space character
> in the string.
> 
> 2) raw triple-quoted strings will *NOT* be reformatted. Any space to
> the left side is deemed to be significant.
> 
> This is indeed a quite simple idea, with the potential to simplify
> some code. It will also encourage people to write triple-quoted
> strings for long strings, which is something that people usually do to
> avoid the extra space.

I'd be +0, since the behaviour you suggest is what I generally want when I use 
long strings. However, I almost always set up such strings as module globals, so 
the indenting issue doesn't usually bother me in practice. . .

If the compatibility problems prove to be a deal breaker (i.e. someone somewhere 
actually wants the extra space, and adding an 'r' character to the source for 
compatibility with a new Python release is too much of a burden), then another 
alternative is a new string type character (e.g. 't' for 'trimmed', to use the 
PEP 257 terminology. 'i' for 'indented' would also work - the source code for 
the string literal is indented, so that indenting should be removed from the 
resulting string).

The argument against the inevitable suggestion of just using a function (as you 
already do) is that a function call doesn't work for a docstring.

Cheers,
Nick.