Spread a statement over various lines

[Manfred Lotz]

On Wed, 18 Sep 2019 09:52:21 +0200
Wolfgang Maier <wolfgang.maier at biologie.uni-freiburg.de> wrote:

> On 17.09.19 20:59, Manfred Lotz wrote:
> > I have a function like follows
> > 
> > def regex_from_filepat(fpat):
> >     rfpat = fpat.replace('.', '\\.') \
> >                       .replace('%', '.')  \
> >                       .replace('*', '.*')
> > 
> >     return '^' + rfpat + '$'
> > 
> > 
> > As I don't want to have the replace() functions in one line my
> > question is if it is ok to spread the statement over various lines
> > as shown above, or if there is a better way?
> >   
> 
> One problem with explicit line continuation using \ is that it is
> dependent on the backslash being the last character on the line, i.e.
> a single space at the end of the line will result in a SyntaxError.
> This is why implicit line continuation relying on opened parentheses,
> brackets or curly braces is often preferred, and recommended over
> backslash continuation in PEP8
> (https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0008/#maximum-line-length).
> To use implicit line continuation you could either introduce extra
> surrounding parentheses as suggested by others, or you may make use
> of the parentheses you have already, like so:
> 
> def regex_from_filepat(fpat):
>     rfpat = fpat.replace(
>         '.', '\\.'
>     ).replace(
>         '%', '.'
>     ).replace(
>         '*', '.*'
>     )
> 
>     return '^' + rfpat + '$'
> 
> 

Thanks for showing. Good to be aware of this possiblity. So, it seems
it doesn't hurt to read PEP8.