snick 1.4.1

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Gadgets for managing indented text

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

What's with the name?

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!

Methods

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

dedent

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)

indent

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

dedent_all

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 #3

unwrap

This 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

conjoin

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.

strip_whitespace

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

indent_wrap

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.

pretty_print

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,
}

pretty_format

This method is the same as pretty_print() but returns the string instead of printing to a IO stream

enboxify

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             *
****************************