SF patch #598163 (Ville Vainio, vvainio@users.sourceforge.net):
document dedent() function.
diff --git a/Doc/lib/libtextwrap.tex b/Doc/lib/libtextwrap.tex
index 8c58d5d..fa0b1fc 100644
--- a/Doc/lib/libtextwrap.tex
+++ b/Doc/lib/libtextwrap.tex
@@ -10,10 +10,10 @@
The \module{textwrap} module provides two convenience functions,
\function{wrap()} and \function{fill()}, as well as
-\class{TextWrapper}, the class that does all the work. If you're just
-wrapping or filling one or two text strings, the convenience functions
-should be good enough; otherwise, you should use an instance of
-\class{TextWrapper} for efficiency.
+\class{TextWrapper}, the class that does all the work, and a utility function
+\function{dedent()}. If you're just wrapping or filling one or two
+text strings, the convenience functions should be good enough; otherwise,
+you should use an instance of \class{TextWrapper} for efficiency.
\begin{funcdesc}{wrap}{text\optional{, width\optional{, \moreargs}}}
Wraps the single paragraph in \var{text} (a string) so every line is at
@@ -42,6 +42,31 @@
strings, it will be more efficient for you to create your own
\class{TextWrapper} object.
+An additional utility function, \function{dedent()}, is provided to
+remove indentation from strings that have unwanted whitespace to the
+left of the text.
+
+\begin{funcdesc}{dedent}{text}
+Remove any whitespace than can be uniformly removed from the left
+of every line in \var{text}.
+
+This is typically used to make triple-quoted strings line up with
+the left edge of screen/whatever, while still presenting it in the
+source code in indented form.
+
+For example:
+\begin{verbatim}
+def test():
+ # end first line with \ to avoid the empty line!
+ s = '''\
+ Hey
+ there
+ '''
+ print repr(s) # prints ' Hey\n there\n '
+ print repr(dedent(s)) # prints 'Hey\nthere\n'
+\end{verbatim}
+\end{funcdesc}
+
\begin{classdesc}{TextWrapper}{...}
The \class{TextWrapper} constructor accepts a number of optional
keyword arguments. Each argument corresponds to one instance attribute,