Long strings in Python

, Will Kahn-Greene | share this (mastodon)
Note: This is an old post in a blog with a lot of posts over a long span of time. The world has changed, technologies have changed, and I've changed. It's likely this is out of date, the code doesn't work, the ideas haven't aged well, or the ideas were terrible to begin with. Let me know if you think this is something that needs updating.

In Miro, we've got long strings that are displayed in the user interface. I think the code that defines these strings is messy and hard to parse. For example:

def some_func():
    description = _("""\
This is a really long description that has multiple sentences and a few \
things that need to %(getfilledin)s and it goes on and on and on and on \
and I'm not really sure what's the best way to format it so that it's happy \
in editors and easier to parse.""") % {"getfilledin": blahblah}

PEP-8 doesn't address this, which is fine. I was curious to see what other projects do.

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