Pythonic way of printing multi-line strings

Python Help
1

Hello all,

I’m looking to find out what is the proper, pythonic way of printing multi-line strings, for example a message for a programs user.

The issue I’ve come across concerns indentation; when print() is nested inside a statement such as an if-then or try-except, the call to print() will be indented. If one wishes to continue the printed string onto subsequent lines in the .py file, all lines after the first must be aligned with the left margin (i.e not indented) as any indentation will be printed to the user. Consider the following example…

if True:
    print('The Owl and the Pussy-Cat went to sea in a beautiful pea green boat\n\
    they took some honey and plenty of money wrapped up in a five pound note')

The result would be a second line that was indented by four places past the first line within the output of the program. Docstrings exhibit the same behaviour…

if True:
    print('''The Owl and the Pussy-Cat went to sea in a beautiful pea green boat\n
    they took some honey and plenty of money wrapped up in a five pound note''')

The only solutions I’ve come up with so far are either to not indent any of the lines after the first…

if True:
    print('The Owl and the Pussy-Cat went to sea in a beautiful pea green boat\n\
they took some honey and plenty of money wrapped up in a five pound note')

Or to replace all instances of four consecutive white-space characters with an empty string…

if True:
    print('The owl and the Pussy-Cat went to sea in a beautiful pea green boat\n\
    they took some honey and plenty of money wrapped up in a five pound note'.replace('    ', ''))

In BASH there is a notation that can be used to write here-documents containing tabs that the shell will ignore…

if true; then
        cat <<- _EOF_
                The Owl and the Pussy-Cat went to sea in a beautiful pea green boat
                they took some honey and plenty of money wrapped up in a five pound note
        _EOF_
fi

I’m pretty much looking for something like the above, but if there is a more proper or ‘pythonic’ way to do it then please let me know!

2

Have you looked at the textwrap.dedent function? Might be what you want here.

1 Like
3

Instead of escaping the newline, how about just using explicit quoting?

if True:
    print('The Owl and the Pussy-Cat went to sea in a beautiful pea green boat\n'
          'they took some honey and plenty of money wrapped up in a five pound note')
4 Likes
4

When in doubt, consult PEP8 - Style Guide for Python Code

The preferred way of wrapping long lines is by using Python’s implied line continuation inside parentheses, brackets and braces. Long lines can be broken over multiple lines by wrapping expressions in parentheses. These should be used in preference to using a backslash for line continuation.

Something like:

print(('The Owl and the Pussy-Cat went to sea in a beautiful '
       'pea green boat they took some honey and plenty of money '
       'wrapped up in a five pound note'))
1 Like
5

Also try inspect.cleandoc:

print(inspect.cleandoc("""First line
                          precedes the second line.
                          The final line."""))
3 Likes
6

Thanks, so it seems this is the officially sanctioned way to do it :slightly_smiling_face:

7

I didn’t even realise this was a feature, thanks!

8

Keep in mind that PEP8 is the official style guide for the code in
Python’s stdlib. So this “official” recommendation is for Python’s
library code.

That said, most people use PEP8 as the basis for their preferred style,
either entirely or mostly.

Cheers,
Cameron Simpson cs@cskk.id.au