So I've recently been making pretty frequent use of textwrap.dedent() to
allow me to use triple-quoted strings at indented levels of code without
getting the extra spaces prefixed to each line. I discovered today that
not only does textwrap.dedent() strip any leading spaces, but it also
substitutes any internal tabs with spaces. For example::
py> def test():
... x = ('abcd efgh\n'
... 'ijkl mnop\n')
... y = textwrap.dedent('''\
... abcd efgh
... ijkl mnop
... ''')
... return x, y
...
py> test()
('abcd\tefgh\nijkl\tmnop\n', 'abcd efgh\nijkl mnop\n')
Note that even though the tabs are internal, they are still removed by
textwrap.dedent(). The documentation[1] says:
"""
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.
"""
So it looks to me like even if this is a "feature" it is undocumented.
I'm planning on filing a bug report, but I wanted to check here first in
case I'm just smoking something.
STeVe
[1] http://docs.python.org/lib/module-textwrap.html
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