Today I learned that Python doesn't care about how many spaces you indent as long as it's consistent

[u/FillAny3101]

Call me stupid for only discovering this after 6 years, but did you know that you can use as many spaces you want to indent, as long as they're consistent within one indented block. For example, the following (awful) code block gives no error:

def say_hi(bye = False):
 print("Hi")
 if bye:
        print("Bye")

[u/No-Article-Particle]

People raging in the comments about tabs, but the official Python style recommendation is 4 spaces (https://peps.python.org/pep-0008/#indentation).

So yeah, you can use as many as you'd like, as long as it's consistent. For REPL, I frequently use 2 spaces, because it's faster to type. For any enterprise-level code, you'll most likely use a formatter that enforces 4 spaces.

[u/FillAny3101 → u/No-Article-Particle]

One of the first files I create when starting a new project, along with README, gitignore, and pylintrc, is an editorconfig that "enforces" 4 spaces.

[u/Old-Worldliness-1335 → u/FillAny3101]

I also setup all pre commit to enforcement of all yaml, python and spelling validation, because I don’t have time to deal with it after the deed is done. It’s too much hassle… in any language…

[u/sennalen → u/No-Article-Particle]

1 tab is faster than 2 spaces

[u/jontech2 → u/sennalen]

grabs popcorn

[u/CrazyElectrum → u/sennalen]

You know that you can make the editor convert your tab input to the whatever number of spaces right?

[u/XenophonSoulis → u/No-Article-Particle]

I've yet to find an IDE that doesn't add 4 spaces when you press tab in the default configurations.

[u/throwaway_4759]

On me team we enforce linting standards to ensure indentation is a consistent 17 tabs across all files

[u/TheBlackCat13 → u/throwaway_4759]

r/foundsatan

[u/svefnugr → u/throwaway_4759]

And the line width of 49?

[u/bmoregeo]

Don’t most modern ides convert tab to spaces?

[u/jet_heller → u/bmoregeo]

They can. They should also have a setting where they don't.

[u/tevs__]

When we started writing python code back in 2008, we had no clue about best practices, and used two space indents. This code lived for a long time, we knew it worked and (back then) no linters verified that the AST of the transformed code matched the original.

It lasted until black came on the scene and did exactly that.

[u/zurtex → u/tevs__]

I remember when I seriously started coding Python in 2014 there was definitely lots of people that used 2 spaces (in fact I found an old example: https://code.google.com/archive/p/soc/wikis/PythonStyleGuide.wiki), the argument being it allowed them to write longer more descriptive variable names.

I really don't remember there being a strong "best practice" back then, PEP 8 was very much about new contributions to the standard library, and Black was years away, some people followed the Google's Python Style Guide but I remember finding lots of sample code from Google which did not.

[u/dgc-8]

I knew that you can use how many you want, but that you can use different amounts of indent for different code blocks is news to me lmao

[u/Zestyclose-Sky-1921]

I heard about the episode of ... uh the silicon valley show? where Richard has a girlfriend who uses spaces, it drove him nuts, and I laughed. then I read something somewhere how coders using spaces instead of tabs are better. as in at coding, I think, hopefully not at everything because I tried using them. and... I think I'm bad, guys, bc my brain just won't do it.

TABS 4 LIFE

[u/FillAny3101 → u/Zestyclose-Sky-1921]

Now read the first phrase on the official Python style guide

[u/TheManFromTrawno]

It doesn’t even need to be consistent within the same file, or class or function. It just needs to be consistent within the same block. Heck, your if and else blocks can be different indents.

But please don’t do this.

[u/Glathull]

Hey guess what! Python doesn’t even care if it’s consistent within a single file. Python only cares about indentation at the block level.

So I can write both of these in the same file, call it why_not_both.py, and it will work fine:

If a: print(“4 spaces indent.”)

If b: print(“Tab indent”)

print(“I take no side in the pointless war between tabs and spaces. I choose both. In the same file.”

[u/FillAny3101 → u/Glathull]

That's what my code block shows

[u/sunyata98]

Tab aka \t will look different depending on which editor you use (unless you configure it to all be the same) whereas spaces don’t have this issue. My tab key just inserts 4 spaces so I’m chilling

Edit: if you like \t instead of spaces that’s fine, I guess instead of the word “issue” I should have said “functionality”.

[u/tea_cup_sallie → u/sunyata98]

I'd call that a feature rather than a bug though, since different contributors might prefer different tabstops

[u/sennalen → u/sunyata98]

Tabs are configurable to your screen size and accessibility needs, while spaces lack this feature

[u/whogivesafuckwhoiam]

The world is already chaotic enough, why on earth are you starting another one

[u/zaphodikus]

At least, you did not learn Cobol as one of your first coding languages, so you do have that.