Enhancement: i-Strings

[AdityaShankar]

BPO	36628
Nosy	@tirkarthi

^{Note: these values reflect the state of the issue at the time it was migrated and might not reflect the current state.}

Show more details

GitHub fields:

assignee = None
closed_at = <Date 2019-04-14.14:10:05.248>
created_at = <Date 2019-04-14.13:58:27.055>
labels = ['interpreter-core', 'type-feature', '3.9']
title = 'Enhancement: i-Strings'
updated_at = <Date 2019-04-15.06:26:08.004>
user = 'https://bugs.python.org/AdityaShankar'

bugs.python.org fields:

activity = <Date 2019-04-15.06:26:08.004>
actor = 'Aditya Shankar'
assignee = 'none'
closed = True
closed_date = <Date 2019-04-14.14:10:05.248>
closer = 'SilentGhost'
components = ['Interpreter Core']
creation = <Date 2019-04-14.13:58:27.055>
creator = 'Aditya Shankar'
dependencies = []
files = []
hgrepos = []
issue_num = 36628
keywords = []
message_count = 3.0
messages = ['340208', '340210', '340213']
nosy_count = 3.0
nosy_names = ['SilentGhost', 'xtreak', 'Aditya Shankar']
pr_nums = []
priority = 'normal'
resolution = 'duplicate'
stage = 'resolved'
status = 'closed'
superseder = None
type = 'enhancement'
url = 'https://bugs.python.org/issue36628'
versions = ['Python 3.9']

[AdityaShankar]

Problem: multiline strings are a pain to represent (other than of-course in docstrings), representing a multiline string inside a function looks something like this -

def foo():
    # some code
    ...
    ...
    # some code
    text = """abc meta alpha chronos
dudes uptomes this text
is nonsense"""
    return somethingwith(text)

or

def foo():
    # some code
    ...
    ...
    # some code
    text = "\n".join(["abc meta alpha chronos",
                      "dudes uptomes this text",
                      "is nonsense"])
    return somethingwith(text)

an enhancement would be -

def foo():
    # some code
    ...
    ...
    # some code
    text = i"""
            abc meta alpha chronos
            dudes uptomes this text
            is nonsense
            """
    return somethingwith(text)
i.e. all initial spaces are not considered as a part of the string in each ine

for example while throwing an exception -
def foo(bad_param):
    ...
    try:
        some_function_on(bad_param)
    except someException:
        throw(fi"""
                you cant do that because, and I'm gonna explain
                this in a paragraph of text with this {variable}
                because it explains things more clearly, also
                here is the {bad_param}
                """)
    ...
which is far neater than -

def foo(bad_param):
    ...
    try:
        some_function_on(bad_param)
    except someException:
        throw(f"""you cant do that because, and I'm gonna explain
this in a paragraph of text with this {variable}
because it explains things more clearly, also
here is the {bad_param}""")
    ...

pros:
- represented code is closer to output text
- implementation should not be too hard

[SilentGhost]

This type of enhancements should be in the first place discussed on python-ideas mailing list and a PEP would probably be needed at the second stage. Not that I think it's likely this suggestion has much chance.

What you're desiring can already be implemented using implicit string concatenation (with addition of some parentheses in some of your examples).

[tirkarthi]

Some discussions in the past and the common suggestion/idiom is to use textwrap.dedent. I agree with @SilentGhost that it should be first brought up in python-ideas and also addressing the concerns for similar proposal in the past if they are still valid.

Proposes d"" for indentation : https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-ideas/2010-November/008589.html
https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2005-July/054649.html