multiline strings and proper indentation/alignment

Tue May 9 15:57:20 EDT 2006

Gary John Salerno wrote:

>How do you make a single string span multiple lines, but also allow 
>yourself to indent the second (third, etc.) lines so that it lines up 
>where you want it, without causing the newlines and tabs or spaces to be 
>added to the string as well?
>
>Example (pretend this is all on one line):
>
>self.DTD = '<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 
>4.01//EN"\n"http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">\n\n'
>
>I want it to read:
>
>self.DTD = '''<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN"\n
>            "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">\n\n'''
>
>Or anything like that, but I don't want the extra newline or tabs to be 
>a part of the string when it's printed.
>
>Thanks.
>  
>
The textwrap module has a function to do just the thing you want.  

*dedent*( 	text)

    Remove any whitespace that can be uniformly removed from the left of
    every line in text.

                This is typically used to make triple-quoted strings
    line up with the left edge of screen/whatever, while still
    presenting it in the source code in indented form.

Gary Herron