multiline strings and proper indentation/alignment

Tue May 9 21:10:42 EDT 2006

Gary Herron wrote:
> 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
> 
> 

But does this do anything to the newline character that gets added to 
the end of the first line?