All patches and comments are welcome. Please squash your changes to logical
commits before using git-format-patch and git-send-email to
patches@git.madduck.net.
If you'd read over the Git project's submission guidelines and adhered to them,
I'd be especially grateful.
3 [![Build Status](https://travis-ci.org/ambv/black.svg?branch=master)](https://travis-ci.org/ambv/black) ![License: MIT](https://img.shields.io/github/license/ambv/black.svg) ![PyPI](https://img.shields.io/pypi/v/black.svg) [![Code style: black](https://img.shields.io/badge/code%20style-black-000000.svg)](https://github.com/ambv/black)
8 *Black* is the uncompromising Python code formatter. By using it, you
9 agree to cease control over minutiae of hand-formatting. In return,
10 *Black* gives you speed, determinism, and freedom from `pycodestyle`
11 nagging about formatting. You will save time and mental energy for
12 more important matters.
14 Blackened code looks the same regardless of the project you're reading.
15 Formatting becomes transparent after a while and you can focus on the
18 *Black* makes code review faster by producing the smallest diffs
22 ## NOTE: This is an early pre-release
24 *Black* can already successfully format itself and the standard library.
25 It also sports a decent test suite. However, it is still very new.
26 Things will probably be wonky for a while. This is made explicit by the
27 "Alpha" trove classifier, as well as by the "a" in the version number.
28 What this means for you is that **until the formatter becomes stable,
29 you should expect some formatting to change in the future**.
31 Also, as a temporary safety measure, *Black* will check that the
32 reformatted code still produces a valid AST that is equivalent to the
33 original. This slows it down. If you're feeling confident, use
39 *Black* can be installed by running `pip install black`.
42 black [OPTIONS] [SRC]...
45 -l, --line-length INTEGER Where to wrap around. [default: 88]
46 --check Don't write back the files, just return the
47 status. Return code 0 means nothing would
48 change. Return code 1 means some files would be
49 reformatted. Return code 123 means there was an
51 --fast / --safe If --fast given, skip temporary sanity checks.
53 --version Show the version and exit.
54 --help Show this message and exit.
57 `Black` is a well-behaved Unix-style command-line tool:
58 * it does nothing if no sources are passed to it;
59 * it will read from standard input and write to standard output if `-`
60 is used as the filename;
61 * it only outputs messages to users on standard error;
62 * exits with code 0 unless an internal error occured (or `--check` was
66 ## The philosophy behind *Black*
68 *Black* reformats entire files in place. It is not configurable. It
69 doesn't take previous formatting into account. It doesn't reformat
70 blocks that start with `# fmt: off` and end with `# fmt: on`. It also
71 recognizes [YAPF](https://github.com/google/yapf)'s block comments to
72 the same effect, as a courtesy for straddling code.
75 ### How *Black* formats files
77 *Black* ignores previous formatting and applies uniform horizontal
78 and vertical whitespace to your code. The rules for horizontal
79 whitespace are pretty obvious and can be summarized as: do whatever
80 makes `pycodestyle` happy.
82 As for vertical whitespace, *Black* tries to render one full expression
83 or simple statement per line. If this fits the allotted line length,
98 If not, *Black* will look at the contents of the first outer matching
99 brackets and put that in a separate indented line.
103 l = [[n for n in list_bosses()], [n for n in list_employees()]]
108 [n for n in list_bosses()], [n for n in list_employees()]
112 If that still doesn't fit the bill, it will decompose the internal
113 expression further using the same rule, indenting matching brackets
114 every time. If the contents of the matching brackets pair are
115 comma-separated (like an argument list, or a dict literal, and so on)
116 then *Black* will first try to keep them on the same line with the
117 matching brackets. If that doesn't work, it will put all of them in
122 def very_important_function(template: str, *variables, file: os.PathLike, debug: bool = False):
123 """Applies `variables` to the `template` and writes to `file`."""
124 with open(file, 'w') as f:
129 def very_important_function(
135 """Applies `variables` to the `template` and writes to `file`."""
136 with open(file, 'w') as f:
140 You might have noticed that closing brackets are always dedented and
141 that a trailing comma is always added. Such formatting produces smaller
142 diffs; when you add or remove an element, it's always just one line.
143 Also, having the closing bracket dedented provides a clear delimiter
144 between two distinct sections of the code that otherwise share the same
145 indentation level (like the arguments list and the docstring in the
148 Unnecessary trailing commas are removed if an expression fits in one
149 line. This makes it 1% more likely that your line won't exceed the
150 allotted line length limit.
152 *Black* avoids spurious vertical whitespace. This is in the spirit of
153 PEP 8 which says that in-function vertical whitespace should only be
154 used sparingly. One exception is control flow statements: *Black* will
155 always emit an extra empty line after ``return``, ``raise``, ``break``,
156 ``continue``, and ``yield``. This is to make changes in control flow
157 more prominent to readers of your code.
159 That's it. The rest of the whitespace formatting rules follow PEP 8 and
160 are designed to keep `pycodestyle` quiet.
165 You probably noticed the peculiar default line length. *Black* defaults
166 to 88 characters per line, which happens to be 10% over 80. This number
167 was found to produce significantly shorter files than sticking with 80
168 (the most popular), or even 79 (used by the standard library). In
169 general, [90-ish seems like the wise choice](https://youtu.be/wf-BqAjZb8M?t=260).
171 If you're paid by the line of code you write, you can pass
172 `--line-length` with a lower number. *Black* will try to respect that.
173 However, sometimes it won't be able to without breaking other rules. In
174 those rare cases, auto-formatted code will exceed your allotted limit.
176 You can also increase it, but remember that people with sight disabilities
177 find it harder to work with line lengths exceeding 100 characters.
178 It also adversely affects side-by-side diff review on typical screen
179 resolutions. Long lines also make it harder to present code neatly
180 in documentation or talk slides.
182 If you're using Flake8, you can bump `max-line-length` to 88 and forget
183 about it. Alternatively, use [Bugbear](https://github.com/PyCQA/flake8-bugbear)'s
184 B950 warning instead of E501 and keep the max line length at 80 which
185 you are probably already using. You'd do it like this:
190 select = C,E,F,W,B,B950
194 You'll find *Black*'s own .flake8 config file is configured like this.
195 If you're curious about the reasoning behind B950, Bugbear's documentation
196 explains it. The tl;dr is "it's like highway speed limits, we won't
197 bother you if you overdo it by a few km/h".
202 *Black* will allow single empty lines left by the original editors,
203 except when they're added within parenthesized expressions. Since such
204 expressions are always reformatted to fit minimal space, this whitespace
207 It will also insert proper spacing before and after function definitions.
208 It's one line before and after inner functions and two lines before and
209 after module-level functions. *Black* will put those empty lines also
210 between the function definition and any standalone comments that
211 immediately precede the given function. If you want to comment on the
212 entire function, use a docstring or put a leading comment in the function
216 ### Editor integration
218 * Visual Studio Code: [joslarson.black-vscode](https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=joslarson.black-vscode)
220 Any tool that can pipe code through *Black* using its stdio mode (just
221 [use `-` as the file name](http://www.tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/special-chars.html#DASHREF2)).
222 The formatted code will be returned on stdout (unless `--check` was
223 passed). *Black* will still emit messages on stderr but that shouldn't
224 affect your use case.
226 There is currently no integration with any other text editors. Vim and
227 Atom/Nuclide integration is planned by the author, others will require
228 external contributions.
230 Patches welcome! ✨ 🍰 ✨
235 **Dusty Phillips**, [writer](https://smile.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=dusty+phillips):
237 > Black is opinionated so you don't have to be.
239 **Hynek Schlawack**, [creator of `attrs`](http://www.attrs.org/), core
240 developer of Twisted and CPython:
242 > An auto-formatter that doesn't suck is all I want for Xmas!
244 **Carl Meyer**, [Django](https://www.djangoproject.com/) core developer:
246 > At least the name is good.
248 **Kenneth Reitz**, creator of [`requests`](http://python-requests.org/)
249 and [`pipenv`](https://docs.pipenv.org/):
251 > This vastly improves the formatting of our code. Thanks a ton!
256 Use the badge in your project's README.md:
259 [![Code style: black](https://img.shields.io/badge/code%20style-black-000000.svg)](https://github.com/ambv/black)
262 Looks like this: [![Code style: black](https://img.shields.io/badge/code%20style-black-000000.svg)](https://github.com/ambv/black)
274 ## This tool requires Python 3.6.0+ to run
276 But you can reformat Python 2 code with it, too. *Black* is able to parse
277 all of the new syntax supported on Python 3.6 but also *effectively all*
278 the Python 2 syntax at the same time.
280 By making the code exclusively Python 3.6+, I'm able to focus on the
281 quality of the formatting and re-use all the nice features of the new
282 releases (check out [pathlib](https://docs.python.org/3/library/pathlib.html) or
283 f-strings) instead of wasting cycles on Unicode compatibility, and so on.
293 In terms of inspiration, *Black* is about as configurable as *gofmt* and
294 *rustfmt* are. This is deliberate.
296 Bug reports and fixes are always welcome! However, before you suggest a
297 new feature or configuration knob, ask yourself why you want it. If it
298 enables better integration with some workflow, fixes an inconsistency,
299 speeds things up, and so on - go for it! On the other hand, if your
300 answer is "because I don't like a particular formatting" then you're not
301 ready to embrace *Black* yet. Such changes are unlikely to get accepted.
302 You can still try but prepare to be disappointed.
304 More details can be found in [CONTRIBUTING](CONTRIBUTING.md).
309 ### 18.3a4 (unreleased)
311 * automatic detection of deprecated Python 2 forms of print statements
312 and exec statements in the formatted file (#49)
314 * only return exit code 1 when --check is used (#50)
316 * don't remove single trailing commas from square bracket indexing
319 * don't omit whitespace if the previous factor leaf wasn't a math
322 * omit extra space in kwarg unpacking if it's the first argument (#46)
327 * don't remove single empty lines outside of bracketed expressions
330 * added ability to pipe formatting from stdin to stdin (#25)
332 * restored ability to format code with legacy usage of `async` as
335 * even better handling of numpy-style array indexing (#33, again)
340 * changed positioning of binary operators to occur at beginning of lines
341 instead of at the end, following [a recent change to PEP8](https://github.com/python/peps/commit/c59c4376ad233a62ca4b3a6060c81368bd21e85b)
344 * ignore empty bracket pairs while splitting. This avoids very weirdly
345 looking formattings (#34, #35)
347 * remove a trailing comma if there is a single argument to a call
349 * if top level functions were separated by a comment, don't put four
350 empty lines after the upper function
352 * fixed unstable formatting of newlines with imports
354 * fixed unintentional folding of post scriptum standalone comments
355 into last statement if it was a simple statement (#18, #28)
357 * fixed missing space in numpy-style array indexing (#33)
359 * fixed spurious space after star-based unary expressions (#31)
366 * only put trailing commas in function signatures and calls if it's
367 safe to do so. If the file is Python 3.6+ it's always safe, otherwise
368 only safe if there are no `*args` or `**kwargs` used in the signature
371 * fixed invalid spacing of dots in relative imports (#6, #13)
373 * fixed invalid splitting after comma on unpacked variables in for-loops
376 * fixed spurious space in parenthesized set expressions (#7)
378 * fixed spurious space after opening parentheses and in default
381 * fixed spurious space after unary operators when the operand was
382 a complex expression (#15)
387 * first published version, Happy 🍰 Day 2018!
391 * date-versioned (see: https://calver.org/)
396 Glued together by [Łukasz Langa](mailto:lukasz@langa.pl).