This library provides several text manipulation gadgets that are useful when dealing with indentation in text. You might find them helpful when you are:
- logging blocks of text
- testing output
- formatting machine generated text in a human readable way
There's really no very good synonyms for the verb, 'indent'. However, there are several for the act of creating a small dent in something. one of my favorites was 'snick'. It means "to cut a small notch or incision in". I think I'll use that!
Most of these methods have additional options and arguments that can be used to augment their output. This is just a cursory over-view. Please consult the source code for more details
This method unindents a block of text by aligning all lines with the left most
This is very good if you wish to use python triple-quote strings in your code, like to start the text on its own line, but do not wish to leave them indented:
class Whatever:
@staticmethod
def print_some_stuff():
print(snick.dedent("""
Here is some text
here is some other text
we don't want this indented
when it's printed
(to the console)
"""))calling Whatever.print_some_stuff() will result in dedented output:
Here is some text
here is some other text
we don't want this indented
when it's printed
(to the console)
The dedent method also has an optional should_strip parameter that, if set to False,
will preserve the newlines before and after triple quoted text:
dummy_text = """
Here is some text
here is some other text
we don't want this indented
when it's printed
(to the console)
"""calling print(snick.dedent(dummy_text, should_strip=False) will result in dedented
output that preserves leading and following newlines like so:
Here is some text
here is some other text
we don't want this indented
when it's printed
(to the console)
This method indents a block of text. It's a thin wrapper around textwrap.indent().
However, it includes a default prefix of 4 spaces. This could be handy if you want
to indent some lines of text that you join with newline:
print(snick.indent('\n'.join([
'would be so nice',
'to indent these',
'i guess',
])))The snippet above will produce:
would be so nice
to indent these
i guess
This function just applies a dedent to each argument you pass it separately and then joins them together. This is useful if you want to dynamically produce some items that you need to add to some other long string. Here's an example:
print(snick.dedent_all(
"""
Here is a long bit of text
as an introduction to the
folowing dynamic items:
--------------------------
""",
*(f"* Item #{i}" for i in range(1, 4)),
))The snippet above would produce:
Here is a long bit of text
as an introduction to the
folowing dynamic items:
--------------------------
* Item #1
* Item #2
* Item #3This method unwraps a block of text. It does this by joining all lines into a single string. It works on indented text as well. This might be convenient if you have a very indented block of code and you need to type a long string out. You could unwrap a triple-quoted block:
if True:
if True:
if True:
if True:
if True:
if True:
if True:
if True:
print(snick.unwrap("""
I need to have a very long string here, but
it would go way outside of the line length
limit and cause me all sorts of grief with
the style checker. So, unwrap can help me
here
"""))The above code block would print this:
I need to have a very long string here, but it would go way outside of the line length limit and cause me all sorts of grief with the style checker. So, unwrap can help me here
This method is a lot like the python built-in join. The difference is that you don't
need to wrap the stuff to wrap in an iterable like a list or tuple. Instead, you can
just pass the items as arguments to the conjoin() function. Here's an example:
print(snick.conjoin(
"Here are some lines",
"that I would like to join",
"and it would be silly",
"to have to wrap them in a",
"list instead of just passing",
"them as plain old arguments",
))The above code would print this:
Here are some lines
that I would like to join
and it would be silly
to have to wrap them in a
list instead of just passing
them as plain old arguments
The conjoin() function also has a keyword argument join_str where you can override
the default value (newline) with string you like.
This method just removes all whitespace from a string. This includes newlines, tabs, spaces, etc. This method is handy for writing tests that need to ignore whitespace used for readability/formatting:
print(snick.strip_whitespace("""
some text with whitespace
and whatnot
"""))The above code block would print out the following:
sometextwithwhitespaceandwhatnot
This method is used to wrap a long string and indent each wrapped line. It might be useful for wrapping and indenting some string that's produced programatically
print("Here's some filler text:")
print(f" {snick.indent_wrap(lorem.text())}")The code block above might generate somethign like this:
Here's some filler text:
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod
tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam,
quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo
consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse
cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat
non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.
This method can be used to pretty-print a dictionary:
snick.pretty_print("'a': {'b': 1, 'c': {'d': 2}, 'e': 3}, 'f': 4}")The code block above would produce formatted output like this:
{
'a': {
'b': 1,
'c': {
'd': 2,
},
'e': 3,
},
'f': 4,
}
This method is the same as pretty_print() but returns the string instead of
printing to a IO stream
This method just draws a box around some text. This is especially useful for logging when you want to make something really pop out:
print(snick.enboxify("""
here's some text that we
want to put into a box.
That will make it look
so very nice
"""))The code-block above will produce output like this:
****************************
* here's some text that we *
* want to put into a box. *
* That will make it look *
* so very nice *
****************************