Re: fix indentation and find non-ascii

Here's the circumstances that brought this up.

I was helping a new programming student walk through some example
code, having him both type manually as well as copy + paste from the
site and we would talk it over.

When it came time to run the module, we ran into a few typos, a few
indentation errors, a capitalization error, no problem, easy fixes.
But the script kept failing on two points: one, it claimed that we
were using non-ascii and needed to declare the file as UTF-8. Two, it
continued to say there was an indentation error after we'd checked it
closely.

I eventually exported the file to vim, but there were no indentation problems.

What we ended up doing, was to delete the offending line and type it
manually on a new line.

This ended up being much more complicated than it needed to be, in my
opinion. A big reason why I enjoy Python is the emphasis on
simplicity. We were trying to do a simple task.

I think IDLE could add value here by providing convenience features to
get a script back to a simple state, both by fixing indentation as
well as resetting to a dead-simple charset, do deal with things like
accented characters or stylized curly-quotes.

Simple is good and I think IDLE could help simplify here. That's the
overall intent of my suggestions.

On Thu, Mar 27, 2014 at 5:00 PM, Terry Reedy <[email protected]> wrote:
> On 3/27/2014 1:10 AM, Sean Felipe Wolfe wrote:
>>
>> Hey everybody,
>>
>> I was working with a new programmer today and ran into a couple issues
>> which I'd love to see IDLE be able to address:
>>
>> 1) non-asciii charcters: Strip all non-ascii characters. I've found
>> copy/paste on sample code from a website, sometimes picks up spurious
>> non-ascii bits.
>
>
> The problem I have had is spurious ascii chars, such as line #s or prompts.
> There is a proposal for an option to auto-strip '>>>' and '...' prompts. I
> would like a way to strip line numbers in text lines. There is a separate
> proposal to add line #s *beside* but not in text lines.
>
> In Py 3, Python code *is* unicode, so non-ascii chars may be an essential
> part of the code. If copying picks up non-code, it seems to me that this
> would be the fault of the user selection, the presentation format making
> selection of only code impossible (as with the Idle shell and some
> line-numbered windows), the browser, or the website. What case are you
> referring to?
>
> Also, see below.
>
>
>> It would be great to have a pull-down menu function
>>
>> which forces the script to save only ascii and discard the rest.
>
>
> If you mean save to disk, that would be wrong. Modifying text in an edit
> window should be separate from saving.
>
>
>> Maybe there is already a way to do this?
>
>
> I am sure not.
>
>
>> 2) Fix indentation: it would be great to have the equivalent of vim's
>> "gg=G" sequence to automatically fix indentation issues.
>
>
> How do you expect a non-vim user to have any idea what you mean?
>
>
>> I thought we had this already actually?
>
>
> There are indent related options on the preference dialog and editor format
> menu. Without knowing what you want ...
>
> There is a proposal to add a generic extension that could run 3rd party code
> analyzers on the contents of an edit window and display results in an output
> window. Your post suggests that a useful (and simpler) enhancement would be
> a generic way to apply a line-transformation function to all the lines of a
> block (default = whole file). All the options listed on the editor format
> menu (except reformat paragraph) fit the following pattern. (I believe the
> ones that do not say 'region' only modify the whole file.)
>
> def replace_lines(func, file_slice)
>   for line in file_slice:
>     <replace line with func(line)>
>
> I believe both of your requests also fit this pattern.
>
> I do not know whether any of the existing functions use a common loop like
> the above, but the visible enhancement would be to load funcs from a file
> that users can edit. Then users like you could extend Idle simply by adding
> line transformation functions that do exactly what you want, without waiting
> for someone like be to be persuaded to add it and without writing a
> full-blown extension like idlelib/FormatParagraph.py, which is much harder
> than writing just the transform function. This would be much more powerful
> than adding a macro recording facility.
>
> Such an enhancement should also make it easy to bring up an argument input
> box, such as with Format / Tabify Region.
>
> --
> Terry Jan Reedy
>
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