New in version 2.3.
The textwrap module provides two convenience functions, wrap() and fill(), as well as TextWrapper, the class that does all the work, and a utility function dedent(). If you're just wrapping or filling one or two text strings, the convenience functions should be good enough; otherwise, you should use an instance of TextWrapper for efficiency.
text[, width[, ...]]) |
Optional keyword arguments correspond to the instance attributes of
TextWrapper, documented below. width defaults to
70
.
text[, width[, ...]]) |
"\n".join(wrap(text, ...))
In particular, fill() accepts exactly the same keyword arguments as wrap().
Both wrap() and fill() work by creating a TextWrapper instance and calling a single method on it. That instance is not reused, so for applications that wrap/fill many text strings, it will be more efficient for you to create your own TextWrapper object.
An additional utility function, dedent(), is provided to remove indentation from strings that have unwanted whitespace to the left of the text.
text) |
This is typically used to make triple-quoted strings line up with the left edge of screen/whatever, while still presenting it in the source code in indented form.
For example:
def test(): # end first line with \ to avoid the empty line! s = '''\ hello world ''' print repr(s) # prints ' hello\n world\n ' print repr(dedent(s)) # prints 'hello\n world\n'
...) |
wrapper = TextWrapper(initial_indent="* ")
wrapper = TextWrapper() wrapper.initial_indent = "* "
You can re-use the same TextWrapper object many times, and you can change any of its options through direct assignment to instance attributes between uses.
The TextWrapper instance attributes (and keyword arguments to the constructor) are as follows:
70
) The maximum length of wrapped lines. As long as
there are no individual words in the input text longer than
width, TextWrapper guarantees that no output line
will be longer than width characters.
True
) If true, then all tab characters in text
will be expanded to spaces using the expandtabs() method of
text.
True
) If true, each whitespace character (as defined
by string.whitespace
) remaining after tab expansion will be
replaced by a single space. Note:
If expand_tabs is false
and replace_whitespace is true, each tab character will be
replaced by a single space, which is not the same as tab
expansion.
''
) String that will be prepended to the first line
of wrapped output. Counts towards the length of the first line.
''
) String that will be prepended to all lines of
wrapped output except the first. Counts towards the length of each
line except the first.
False
) If true, TextWrapper attempts to detect
sentence endings and ensure that sentences are always separated by
exactly two spaces. This is generally desired for text in a monospaced
font. However, the sentence detection algorithm is imperfect: it
assumes that a sentence ending consists of a lowercase letter followed
by one of ".",
"!", or "?", possibly followed by one of
""" or "'", followed by a space. One problem
with this is algorithm is that it is unable to detect the difference
between ``Dr.'' in
[...] Dr. Frankenstein's monster [...]
and ``Spot.'' in
[...] See Spot. See Spot run [...]
fix_sentence_endings is false by default.
Since the sentence detection algorithm relies on
string.lowercase
for the definition of ``lowercase letter,''
and a convention of using two spaces after a period to separate
sentences on the same line, it is specific to English-language texts.
True
) If true, then words longer than
width will be broken in order to ensure that no lines are
longer than width. If it is false, long words will not be
broken, and some lines may be longer than width. (Long words
will be put on a line by themselves, in order to minimize the amount
by which width is exceeded.)
TextWrapper also provides two public methods, analogous to the module-level convenience functions:
text) |
text) |