Word-wrapping the printing of Strings in Python

Question

I have a long string:

S='Hello\n i have a very very very very..... very very very very.... long Text!'

Printing this text creates one long line and I would like to break the line into pieces with maximum lengths of 10 or 20 characters. I would like to break the line with \n and have the \n included in the new string.

What I'm hoping for:

Hello
i have a very 
very very very
..... very very 
very very.... 
long Text!

See [**`textwrap`**](https://docs.python.org/2/library/textwrap.html) — Peter Wood, Feb 02 '17 at 13:14
Possible duplicate of [Pythonic way to create a long multi-line string](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10660435/pythonic-way-to-create-a-long-multi-line-string) — Uyghur Lives Matter, Feb 02 '17 at 16:27

score 4 · Answer 1 · edited Jun 20 '20 at 09:12

textwrap.wrap allows you to wrap strings to a certain width.

By default it replaces whitespace with single spaces, including newlines, before wrapping.

Set replace_whitespace=False if you want to keep newlines, etc.

>>> import textwrap
>>> s = 'Hello\n i have a very very very very..... very very very very.... long Text!'
>>> print('\n'.join(textwrap.wrap(s, width=20, replace_whitespace=False)))
Hello
 i have a very
very very very.....
very very very
very.... long Text!

The documentation for replace_whitespace:

(default: True) If true, after tab expansion but before wrapping, the wrap() method will replace each whitespace character with a single space. The whitespace characters replaced are as follows: tab, newline, vertical tab, formfeed, and carriage return ('\t\n\v\f\r').

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.

Note If replace_whitespace is false, newlines may appear in the middle of a line and cause strange output. For this reason, text should be split into paragraphs (using str.splitlines() or similar) which are wrapped separately.

score -3 · Answer 2 · answered Feb 02 '17 at 13:14

-3

You can use '''YOUR BIG STRING IN PARAGRAPH WHAT YOU WANT'''

answered Feb 02 '17 at 13:14

Jay Parikh

2,419
17
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score -4 · Answer 3 · answered Feb 02 '17 at 14:14

-4

You can also use double quotes instead of single if that is what you want.

s = """ this is a very
        long string if I had the
        energy to type more and more ..."""

answered Feb 02 '17 at 14:14

Robert Jacobs

3,266
1
20
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did i say anything else ? My answer was similar , why same answer again ? – Jay Parikh Feb 02 '17 at 17:54

Word-wrapping the printing of Strings in Python

3 Answers3