Question

I want to make sure that I only print maximum 80 character long lines, but I have a string s that can be both shorter and longer than that. So I want to split it into lines without splitting any words.

Example of long string:

s = "This is a long string that is holding more than 80 characters and thus should be split into several lines. That is if everything is working properly and nicely and all that. No mishaps no typos. No bugs. But I want the code too look good too. That's the problem!"

I can devise ways of doing this such as:

words = s.split(" ")
line = ""
for w in words:
    if len(line) + len(w) <= 80:
        line += "%s " % w
    else:
        print line
        line ="%s " % w

print line

Equally I could use s.find(" ") iteratively in a while-loop:

sub_str_left = 0
pos = 0
next_pos = s.find(" ", pos)
while next_pos > -1:
    if next_pos - sub_str_left > 80:
        print s[sub_str_left:pos-sub_str_left]
        sub_str_left = pos + 1

    pos = next_pos
    next_pos = s.find(" ", pos)

print s[sub_str_left:]

None of these are very elegant, so my question is if there’s a cooler pythonic way of doing this? (Maybe with regex or so.)

Answer 1

There’s a module for that: textwrap

For instance, you can use

print '\n'.join(textwrap.wrap(s, 80))

or

print textwrap.fill(s, 80)