Show HN: Multiline input wrapper for Python's input()

2 points

6 years ago

Python's input() and readline module support single-line input. I.e., each time the dude typing on the keyboard presses Enter, that ends the line of input, which is then added to the history maintained by readline. It would be nice to type a \ at the end of the line, and continue typing a command on the next line(as happens on bash), but that doesn't work.

input() and readline can, however, deal with history items that happen to be multi-line due to embedded \n characters. The MultiLineReader class takes advantage of this. If a line of input is terminated by a continuation string (e.g. \), then an additional line of input is requested. This continues until a line is provided that does not end with the continuation string. MultiLineReader.input reads lines until it detects one not terminated by a continuation string, and returns those lines concatenated into a string (removing the \ and \n terminating each non-terminal line).

History items are correctly maintained, replacing multiple continued lines, with the one joined-together line. When one of these multi-line history items is edited, it shows up to the keyboard dude as it was typed in originally: multiple lines, with all but the last ending in the continuation string.

The repository is here: https://github.com/geophile/multilinereader.

No license yet, but I'll pick a very liberal license allowing you to do what you want with this software.