snick

Handy gadgets for taming indented text

A small collection of practical utilities for working with indented strings and text formatting:

• Dedent triple-quoted strings without giving up indented code
• Build multi-line output line by line with Conjoiner
• Format data structures like pprint, but with json.dumps-style indentation and trailing commas
• Strip ANSI codes and stray whitespace from terminal output
• Wrap and indent text blocks for logs and reports

Built on the Python standard library. Nothing extra to install.

Quickstart

Requirements

• Python 3.10 or greater

Installation

Install the latest release from PyPI:

pip install snick

Basic usage

Dedent a triple-quoted string without sacrificing indented code:

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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())

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

Build multi-line output line by line:

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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"]))

Daily Report for Alice

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

Format a data structure with consistent indentation:

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

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

For more examples, see the Features page.

uvx --from=snick[demo] snick-demo

What's with the name?

There aren't many good synonyms for the verb "indent", but there are a few for the act of making a small dent in something. "Snick" means "to cut a small notch or incision in." Close enough.