Python String Repetition

https://dariusforoux.com/repetition/

While I was working on one of my many hobby Python projects (I was attempting to scrape novels from some of my favourite online novel sites to convert them to epubs so I can read them offline when I go camping), I noticed that I was doing a lot of this:

There was a lot of copy and pasting going on for all of the | |-- for the print statements. I got about 6 levels deep and finally decided that enough was enough. I was going to simplify this process because frankly, my print statements were getting ridiculously long.

A quick search in my code snippets resulted in:

def cprint(text, level: int):
    start = '|   '
    end = '|-- '

    print(f"""{start * (level - 1)}{end}{text}""")

The key is the last line which makes use of Python string repetition operator.

print(f"""{start * (level - 1)}{end}{text}""")

Some of you may be wondering why I’m using f-string in the print statement instead of having the following?

def cprint(text, level: int):
    start = '|   '
    end = '|-- '

    print(start * (level - 1), end, text)

The reason for that is because when you have multiple items in a print statement that are comma-separated, python will add an extra space after each item, regardless of whether that item has a value or not. So if I was to call cprint('Some Text', 0) or cprint('Some Text', 1) the first option will print

|-- Some Text

whereas the second option will print (there is an extra space at the beginning if you can’t tell)

 |--  Some Text

Here they are next to each other for comparison

|-- Some Text
 |--  Some Text

Once I updated all my print statements, my code output now looks like this

That’s it! A simple and quick function to help prettify/simplify your print statements for better comments readability.