Roy Smith wrote: > It would be much nicer to be able to do: > > epilog = """This my very long epilog string > which goes on for several lines. > """ > > and have dedent() figure out the indenting like help() does for > docstrings. How can I do that (in python 2.7)?
The Source is strong^W tricky in this one... The site module adds the help() function to the builtins: http://hg.python.org/cpython/file/2.7/Lib/site.py The help() function in turn calls pydoc to do the actual work: http://docs.python.org/2/library/pydoc.html The source is rather large and not the easiest to read, but if you read it you will see it does not use textwrap.dedent anywhere. http://hg.python.org/cpython/file/2.7/Lib/pydoc.py You're welcome to read it and decipher how it formats text if you like. But possibly the easiest way to get the effect you are after is with a small helper function: def prepare(text): spaces = (' ', '\t') if text and not text.startswith(spaces): # Find the indent of the *second* non-blank line. indent = [] lines = text.splitlines() for linenum, line in enumerate(lines[1:], 1): line.rstrip() if line.startswith(spaces): for c in line: if c in spaces: indent.append(c) else: break break lines[0] = ''.join(indent) + lines[0] text = '\n'.join(lines) return text And in use: py> epilogue = """This my very long epilogue string ... which goes on for several lines. ... Like this. ... """ py> py> print textwrap.dedent(epilogue) This my very long epilogue string which goes on for several lines. Like this. py> print textwrap.dedent(prepare(epilogue)) This my very long epilogue string which goes on for several lines. Like this. -- Steven -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
