Indented multi-line strings (was: "Data blocks" syntax specification draft)

[Chris Angelico]

On Fri, Jun 1, 2018 at 7:05 AM, Peter J. Holzer <hjp-python at hjp.at> wrote:
> [Strange: I didn't get this mail through the list, only directly]
>
> On 2018-05-31 14:39:17 +0000, Dan Strohl wrote:
>> The outdent method could look like:
>>
>> string.outdent(size=None)
>>     """
>>     :param size : The number of spaces to remove from the beginning of
>>     each line in the string.  Non space characters will not be
>>     removed.  IF this is None, the number of characters in the first
>>     line of the string will be used.
>
> The default should be the minimum number of leading spaces on non-empty
> lines, I think. This is compatible with PEP 257. And in fact it allows
> all lines to start with whitespace if the string ends with a newline
> (which is a weird dependency, but probably not much of a restriction in
> practice).

Exactly. The default will be the most commonly used option when
working with string literals; explicitly setting it is there if you
need it, but won't be the normal way you do things.

Either way, if attached to a string literal, with either no parameter
or a literal integer, this would be a valid candidate for constant
folding. (There's no way to monkeypatch or shadow anything.) At that
point, we would have all the benefits of a new string literal type,
with no syntactic changes, just the creation of the method.

ChrisA