textwrap

The textwrap library wraps and fills paragraphs of text, dedents indented blocks, adds line prefixes, and truncates text to a fixed width. Reach for it when formatting text for fixed-width output such as terminals or plain-text reports.

Available Functions

Functions

textwrap.wrap(text, width=70)

Wraps a single paragraph of text and returns the result as a list of lines. Whitespace is collapsed to single spaces and lines are broken at word boundaries so no line exceeds width characters (except a single word longer than width, which is kept whole on its own line).

Parameters:

• text (str): The text to wrap.
• width (int, optional): Maximum line width. Default: 70.

Returns: list: the wrapped lines.

import textwrap

text = "This is a long line of text that needs to be wrapped"
lines = textwrap.wrap(text, 20)
print(lines)  # ["This is a long line", "of text that needs", "to be wrapped"]

textwrap.fill(text, width=70)

Wraps a single paragraph of text the same way as wrap(), then joins the resulting lines with newlines into a single string.

Parameters:

• text (str): The text to wrap.
• width (int, optional): Maximum line width. Default: 70.

Returns: str: the wrapped text with lines joined by \n.

import textwrap

text = "This is a long line of text that needs to be wrapped"
result = textwrap.fill(text, 20)
print(result)
# This is a long line
# of text that needs
# to be wrapped

textwrap.dedent(text)

Removes the common leading whitespace shared by every non-blank line in text. Lines that are blank or contain only whitespace are ignored when computing the common indentation and are left unchanged.

Parameters:

• text (str): The text to dedent.

Returns: str: the dedented text.

import textwrap

text = "    Hello\n    World\n    Test"
result = textwrap.dedent(text)
print(result)  # "Hello\nWorld\nTest"

textwrap.indent(text, prefix)

Adds prefix to the start of every non-empty line in text. Lines that are empty or contain only whitespace are left unchanged.

Parameters:

• text (str): The text to indent.
• prefix (str): The string to prepend to each non-empty line.

Returns: str: the indented text.

import textwrap

text = "Hello\nWorld"
result = textwrap.indent(text, "  ")
print(result)  # "  Hello\n  World"

# Quote style
result = textwrap.indent(text, "> ")
print(result)  # "> Hello\n> World"

textwrap.shorten(text, width, placeholder="[...]")

Collapses all whitespace in text to single spaces, then truncates the result to fit within width characters, appending placeholder and breaking at a word boundary where possible.

Parameters:

• text (str): The text to shorten.
• width (int): Maximum width of the result, including the placeholder.
• placeholder (str, optional): String appended to indicate truncation. Default: "[...]".

Returns: str: the shortened text.

import textwrap

text = "Hello World, this is a very long line of text"
result = textwrap.shorten(text, 20)
print(result)  # "Hello World,[...]"

# Custom placeholder
result = textwrap.shorten(text, 20, placeholder="...")
print(result)  # "Hello World,..."

Examples

Formatting Long Text

import textwrap

article = "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua."

# Wrap to 40 characters
wrapped = textwrap.fill(article, 40)
print(wrapped)

Creating Indented Blocks

import textwrap

code = "x = 1\ny = 2\nresult = x + y"
indented = textwrap.indent(code, "    ")
print(indented)  # "    x = 1\n    y = 2\n    result = x + y"

Processing Multi-line Strings

import textwrap

# Remove common indentation
template = """
    This text has
    common indentation
    that we want to remove
"""
clean = textwrap.dedent(template)

Truncating for Display

import textwrap

titles = [
    "A Short Title",
    "A Very Long Title That Needs To Be Truncated For Display"
]

for title in titles:
    display = textwrap.shorten(title, 30)
    print(display)

Notes

• wrap() and fill() collapse whitespace and break at word boundaries.
• dedent() only removes common leading whitespace (spaces/tabs that appear at the start of every non-blank line).
• indent() does not add the prefix to empty or whitespace-only lines.
• shorten() attempts to break at a word boundary when truncating.

Python Compatibility

This library implements a subset of Python’s textwrap module:

See Also

• string - String constants for character classification
• regex - Regular expressions for pattern matching
• difflib - Sequence comparison and diffing utilities