Multiline string indentation

Rule request

Thesis

Flake8 has no opinion about multiline strings at all. Everything in this example is correct:

def f():
    a = """
        text
        text
    """
    a = """
        text
        text
        """
    a = """text
        text
        """
    a = """text
        text"""
    a = """
text
text
"""
    return a

And so on.

Let’s choose the only option.

The best option

I vote for the second one:

def f():
    something = """
        text
        text
    """

Because it matches with braces style by PEP-8:

def f():
    something = (
        text,
        text,
    )

Reasoning

Consistency and readability. Let’s not allow to break block indentation in such a rough way.

Solution

The motivation behind allowing such awful things is newlines and indentation preserving in multiline strings. However, you should never rely on it because that variable could be moved in constants, function turned into a method, part of the code wrapped into with statement, and a lot more ways how indentation for statement can be changed. So, always use textwrap.dedent, textwrap.indent, and str.strip to get expected indentation and newlines for a multiline string.

[sobolevn]

I would say these two are different violation. The first one is the best practice, the second one is consistency.

[sobolevn]

Thanks a lot!

Shall multiline strings be allowed to use directly (without assigning to a variable)?

Nope, looks quite unreadable.