tabnanny — Indentation validator¶

Running from the Command Line¶

The simplest way to use tabnanny is to run it from the command line, passing the names of files to check. If you pass directory names, the directories are scanned recursively to find .py files to check.

Running tabnanny across the PyMOTW source code exposed one old module with tabs instead of spaces.

$ python3 -m tabnanny .
./source/queue/fetch_podcasts.py 65 "    \t\tparsed_url = \
urlparse(enclosure['url'])\n"

Line 65 of fetch_podcasts.py had two tabs instead of 8 spaces. This wasn’t apparent in a text editor, which was configured to with tabstops set to 4 spaces, so visually there was no difference.

        for enclosure in entry.get('enclosures', []):
            parsed_url = urlparse(enclosure['url'])
            message('queuing {}'.format(
                parsed_url.path.rpartition('/')[-1]))
            enclosure_queue.put(enclosure['url'])

Correcting line 65 and running tabnanny again showed another error on line 66. One last problem showed up on line 67.

If you want to scan files, but not see the details about the error, use the -q option to suppress all information except the filename.

$ python3 -m tabnanny -q .
./source/queue/fetch_podcasts.py

To see more information about the files being scanned, use the -v option.

'source/queue/': listing directory
'source/queue/fetch_podcasts.py': *** Line 65: trouble in tab
city! ***
offending line: "    \t\tparsed_url = urlparse(enclosure['url'])
\n"
indent not greater e.g. at tab sizes 1, 2
'source/queue/queue_fifo.py': Clean bill of health.
'source/queue/queue_lifo.py': Clean bill of health.
'source/queue/queue_priority.py': Clean bill of health.