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snick

Handy gadgets for taming indented text

Stop wrestling with indented triple-quoted strings and awkward text formatting. snick makes it effortless to:

  • Dedent triple-quoted strings while keeping your code beautifully indented
  • Build complex multi-line output programmatically with the powerful Conjoiner class
  • Format data structures with clean indentation and trailing commas
  • Clean up terminal output by stripping ANSI codes and whitespace
  • Wrap and indent long text blocks for logs and reports

All with zero dependencies.

Quickstart

Requirements

  • Python 3.10 or greater

Installation

Install the latest release from PyPI:

pip install snick

Basic Usage

Ever struggle with indented triple-quoted strings in your code?

dedent() example
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import snick

def my_function():
    return snick.dedent(
        """
        Oops! Something went wrong.
        Here's what happened:
            - The flux capacitor overheated
            - Time circuits malfunctioned
        Please try again later.
        """
    )

print(my_function())

Output: 

Oops! Something went wrong.
Here's what happened:
    - The flux capacitor overheated
    - Time circuits malfunctioned
Please try again later.

Build complex output on the fly:

Conjoiner example
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def generate_report(name, tasks):
    report = snick.Conjoiner()
    report.add(f"Daily Report for {name}", blanks_after=1)

    if tasks:
        report.add("Completed Tasks:")
        report.extend(f"  ✓ {task}" for task in tasks)
    else:
        report.add("No tasks completed today.")

    return str(report)

print(generate_report("Alice", ["Fix bug #123", "Review PR #456", "Deploy v2.0"]))

Output: 

Daily Report for Alice

Completed Tasks:
  ✓ Fix bug #123
  ✓ Review PR #456
  ✓ Deploy v2.0

Format data structures with proper indentation:

pretty_format() example
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data = {
    'user': 'bob',
    'permissions': ['read', 'write', 'execute'],
    'metadata': {'created': '2026-01-22', 'active': True}
}
print(snick.pretty_format(data))

Output: 

{
  'user': 'bob',
  'permissions': [
    'read',
    'write',
    'execute',
  ],
  'metadata': {
    'created': '2026-01-22',
    'active': True,
  },
}

For more examples and detailed documentation, see the Features page.

What's with the name?

There's really no very good synonyms for the verb, 'indent'. However, there are several for the act of creating a small dent in something. One of my favorites was 'snick'. It means "to cut a small notch or incision in". I think I'll use that!