""" Leading summary whitespace (as in this issue title)."""

[olibre]

For better readability, some people prefer inserting a space between the triple quotes """ and the summary text:

def is_ascii(text):
    """ Checks if contains only ASCII characters."""
    return all(ord(letter) < 128 for letter in text)

The leading whitespace:

       🡇
    """ Checks if contains only ASCII characters."""

Without that whitespace:

    """Checks if contains only ASCII characters."""

We may add an option --leading-summary-space or --pre-summary-space or --space-before-summary or --space-after-triple-quotes... What option name do you prefer?

Attention, this option has no effect on multi-lines docstring when --pre-summary-newline is used.

Thanks

[ndevenish]

--pre-summary-space matches the --pre-summary-newline option for naming, so would probably be the least confusing.

[alecmerdler]

@ndevenish Made a pull request adding this option. Mind trying it out?

[merwok]

😮 I have seen extra spaces around a one-line docstring, or extra leading space on the first line of a multiline docstring, but didn’t know there was a style of one-line docstring with leading space but no trailing space.

[thejcannon]

Note that black inserts the leading whitespace. Therefore if you use both black and docformatter you'll be in formatting limbo.

See psf/black#2912

[thejcannon]

Also worth pointing out https://docs.python.org/3/library/inspect.html#inspect.cleandoc strips this, so it should have no semantic difference (help docs do not have the whitespace).

[thejcannon]

Last comment, black only inserts the leading space if the first character is the quote, so it's obvious there's an extra quote. Otherwise there isn't a leading space.

E.g.

# Adds leading space
""" "I'm quoted"."""
# But also doesn't
"""I'm not quoted."""

So applying the space everywhere would still land you in limbo.

[weibullguy]

@thejcannon thanks for pointing this out.

PR #46 is submitted to add the leading space. Once that PR is merged, using the --pre-summary-space option will maintain the black-inserted space. For those who prefer the non-space formatting they would need to run black first, then docformatter. I've asked the #46 pull requester to address this interaction in the README.

[weibullguy]

Closed by #46