Textwrap dedent

February 29, 2024

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Remove leading whitespace from every line in a string with the textwrap.dedent() function. The first example shown below prints a multiline string that is defined in a function. The second example prints the same string but removes the leading whitespace.

This example prints a multiline string. The string is indented on each line due to the indentation of the function body.

def printer():
    s = """
    This is a really long string
    with multiple lines
    of text.
    """
    print(s)

printer()

The output is shown below. Notice the output includes the indentation from the string.

    This is a really long string
    with multiple lines
    of text.

This example uses the textwrap.dedent() function to remove the leading whitespace from every line in the string.

from textwrap import dedent

def printer():
    s = """
    This is a really long string
    with multiple lines
    of text.
    """
    v = dedent(s)
    print(v)

printer()

The output for the dedent example is shown below. Notice the leading white space has been removed from the output.

This is a really long string
with multiple lines
of text.