string - Strip common indentation from the beginning of each line similar to what pydoc help does with docstrings -

i have module foo (in foo.py) function f defined in manner.

def f():     """test      line 1     line 2     """     pass 

this how docstring appears in interactive session.

>>> print(foo.f.__doc__)  test      line 1     line 2  >>> help(foo.f) on function f in module foo:  f()     test      line 1     line 2  >>> 

as, can see help() function takes care of removing common indentation beginning of each line while displaying help. want write own function similar.

for example, if

s = """foo      line 1     line 2     line 3 """ 

then my_function(s) should return

"""foo  line 1 line 2 line 3""" 

is there in python standard library can me this?

you use textwrap.dedent():

import textwrap  def my_function(s):     first, *rest = s.splitlines(keepends=true) # first line special     return first + textwrap.dedent(''.join(rest)) 

example:

>>> my_function(s) 'foo\n\nline 1\nline 2\nline 3\n' 

note: final newline not stripped.