Inconsistent Whitespace error occurrence when using Python doctest with newline characters

Question

Hi all. My question is simple. When you guys write Python doctests, how do you go about introducing the newline characters in the string while testing the process?

Check out the following example:

def remove_newlines(text):
    """
    >>> remove_newlines("line1 \n"
    ...                 "still line 1\r"
    ...                 "now line2 \n"
    ...                 "more line2\n")
    line1 still line1
    now line2 more line2
    """
    return text.replace('\n', '')

import doctest
doctest.run_docstring_examples(remove_newlines, globals())

The output is something like this:

Traceback (most recent call last):
...
ValueError: line 3 of the docstring for NoName has inconsistent leading whitespace: '"'

What am I missing here lads? Using this in a project of mine and I could appreciate all the help that I could get!

Answer 1

Hi. It's pretty simple actually. All you need to do is to escape the backslash and you're good to go.

We already know that the \n is the newline character, right? Also, the docstring itself is a string. Check this out:

def foo():
    """
    print "Hello Edureka! \n";
    """
    pass

The docstring might not contain a completely valid Python statement but see that it contains a quoted string with the newline character in it.

Escaping this character is the key to your problem. Hope this helped!