Docstring has inconsistent leading whitespace

Question

In the following code:

def read_file(filename):
    """
    >>> read_file('text.txt')
    {'Donald Trump': [('Donald Trump', 'Join me live in Springfield, Ohio!\nLit!!\n', 1477604720, 'Twitter for iPhone', 5251, 1895)]}
    """

I get an error saying:

ValueError: line 4 of the docstring for __main__.read_file has inconsistent leading whitespace: 'Lit!!'

Any ideas what is causing this?

Where is the error triggered? It looks like you are running doctests. As someone already answered, the problem is those unescaped `\n` newlines in the test data. But in any case, doctests are not optimal for functions with side effects. This test will fail if `text.txt` can't be found, or the contents is different from what's expected. — Håken Lid, Dec 01 '16 at 19:02

Dimitris Fasarakis Hilliard · Accepted Answer · 2016-12-01T18:53:55.817

12

Escape all backslashes in the documentation string. That is:

\nLit!!\n

Should instead be:

\\nLit!!\\n'

Alternatively you could supply the docstring as a raw string and not worry about backslashes:

r"""
>>> read_file('text.txt')
{'Donald Trump': [('Donald Trump', 'Join me live in Springfield, Ohio!\nLit!!\n', 1477604720, 'Twitter for iPhone', 5251, 1895)]}
"""

edited Dec 01 '16 at 18:53

answered Dec 01 '16 at 18:48

Dimitris Fasarakis Hilliard

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right. the error is due to the fact that the `\n` is interpreted as part of the string thereby braking the expression you provide. – Dimitris Fasarakis Hilliard Dec 01 '16 at 18:51
1

To give a chance for other users to add an answer if they think they have something more to add :-) – Dimitris Fasarakis Hilliard Dec 01 '16 at 18:55
You should also consider simplifying the example data. The docstring would be more readable if you changed the newlines to regular spaces. – Håken Lid Dec 01 '16 at 19:05

Docstring has inconsistent leading whitespace

1 Answers1

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