use-multi-line-text-blocks-with-inspect-cleandoc.md

Use multi-line text blocks with inspect.cleandoc

Python's triple-quoting (""") mechanism makes it easy to express long blocks of multi-line text, but if you indent the text content properly (as you should) you end up with a lot of whitespace at the beginning of each line.

You can fix this with the built-in inspect.cleandoc() function that left trims indented text blocks.

# Define a multi-line text block
>>> x = ("""
...     Here is some text that I am
...     hoping can be cleaned up properly
...     by cleandoc:
...
...     - while keeping
...      - extra whitespace
...        like this
... """)

# The raw text has a lot of excess left padding
>>> print(x)

    Here is some text that I am
    hoping can be cleaned up properly
    by cleandoc:

    - while keeping
     - extra whitespace
       like this

# Use inspect.cleandoc() to clean it up
>>> import inspect
>>> print(inspect.cleandoc(x))
Here is some text that I am
hoping can be cleaned up properly
by cleandoc:

- while keeping
 - extra whitespace
   like this

Be careful though: inspect.cleandoc() also trims leading and trailing empty lines.