Lines and Text

>>> lines("""
...     There was an old woman who lived in a shoe.
...     She had so many children, she didn't know what to do;
...     She gave them some broth without any bread;
...     Then whipped them all soundly and put them to bed.
... """)
['There was an old woman who lived in a shoe.',
 "She had so many children, she didn't know what to do;",
 'She gave them some broth without any bread;',
 'Then whipped them all soundly and put them to bed.']

Note that the “extra” newlines and leading spaces have been taken care of and discarded.

In addition to lines, text works similarly and with the same parameters, but joins the resulting lines into a unified string.:

.. code-block:: pycon

>>> text("""
...     There was an old woman who lived in a shoe.
...     She had so many children, she didn't know what to do;
...     She gave them some broth without any bread;
...     Then whipped them all soundly and put them to bed.
... """)

“There was an old woman who lived in a shoe.nShe …put them to bed.”

(Where the … abbreviates exactly the characters you’d expect.)

So it does the same stripping of pointless whitespace at the beginning and end, returning the data as a clean, convenient string.

Note that while text returns a single string, it maintains the (potentially useful) newlines. Its result is still line-oriented by default. If you want to elide the newlines, use text(text, join=' ') and the newline characters will be replaced with spaces.

A textline call makes this even easier. It gives a single, no-breaks string by default. It’s particularly useful for rendering single, very long lines.

API Options

Both lines and text provide provide routinely-needed cleanups:

  • remove starting and ending blank lines (which are usually due to Python source formatting)
  • remove blank lines internal to your text block
  • remove common indentation (dedent)
  • expand tabs into spaces (optional)
  • strip leading/trailing spaces other than the common prefix (leading spaces removed by request, trailing by default)
  • strip any comments from the end of lines
  • join lines together with your choice of separator string

lines(source, noblanks=True, dedent=True, lstrip=False, rstrip=True, cstrip=True, join=False)

Returns text as a series of cleaned-up lines.

  • source is the text to be processed. It can be presented as a single string, or as a list of lines.
  • noblanks => all blank lines are eliminated, not just starting and ending ones. (default True).
  • dedent => strip a common prefix (usually whitespace) from each line (default True).
  • lstrip => strip all left (leading) space from each line (default False).
    Note that lstrip and dedent are mutually exclusive ways of handling leading space.
  • rstrip => strip all right (trailing) space from each line (default True).
  • expandtabs => expand tabs in string (if True, by default amount, otherwise by given amount).
  • cstrip => strip comments (from # to the end of each line (default True).
  • join => either False (do nothing), True (concatenate lines with \n),
    or a string that will be used to join the resulting lines (default False)

text(source, noblanks=True, dedent=True, lstrip=False, rstrip=True, cstrip=True, join='\n')

Does the same helpful cleanups as lines(), but returns result as a single string, with lines separated by newlines (by default) and without a trailing newline.