How to remove extra indentation of Python triple quoted multi-line strings?

textwrap.dedent from the standard library is there to automatically undo the wacky indentation.

From what I see, a better answer here might be inspect.cleandoc, which does much of what textwrap.dedent does but also fixes the problems that textwrap.dedent has with the leading line.

The below example shows the differences:

>>> import textwrap>>> import inspect>>> x = """foo bar    baz    foobar    foobaz    """>>> inspect.cleandoc(x)'foo bar\nbaz\nfoobar\nfoobaz'>>> textwrap.dedent(x)'foo bar\n    baz\n    foobar\n    foobaz\n'>>> y = """...     foo...     bar... """>>> inspect.cleandoc(y)'foo\nbar'>>> textwrap.dedent(y)'\nfoo\nbar\n'>>> z = """\tfoobar\tbaz""">>> inspect.cleandoc(z)'foo\nbar     baz'>>> textwrap.dedent(z)'\tfoo\nbar\tbaz\n'

Note that inspect.cleandoc also expands internal tabs to spaces.This may be inappropriate for one's use case, but works fine for me.

What follows the first line of a multiline string is part of the string, and not treated as indentation by the parser. You may freely write:

def main():    """foobarfoo2"""    pass

and it will do the right thing.

On the other hand, that's not readable, and Python knows it. So if a docstring contains whitespace in it's second line, that amount of whitespace is stripped off when you use help() to view the docstring. Thus, help(main) and the below help(main2) produce the same help info.

def main2():    """foo    bar    foo2"""    pass