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Introduction — pycodestyle 2.11.1 documentation

28 Jul 20254 min read

Introduction

pycodestyle is a tool to check your Python code against some of the style conventions in PEP 8.

  • Plugin architecture: Adding new checks is easy.
  • Parseable output: Jump to error location in your editor.
  • Small: Just one Python file, requires only stdlib. You can use just the pycodestyle.py file for this purpose.
  • Comes with a comprehensive test suite.

You can install, upgrade, uninstall pycodestyle.py with these commands:

$ pip install pycodestyle
$ pip install --upgrade pycodestyle
$ pip uninstall pycodestyle


$ pycodestyle --first optparse.py
optparse.py:69:11: E401 multiple imports on one line
optparse.py:77:1: E302 expected 2 blank lines, found 1
optparse.py:88:5: E301 expected 1 blank line, found 0
optparse.py:347:31: E211 whitespace before '('
optparse.py:357:17: E201 whitespace after '{'
optparse.py:472:29: E221 multiple spaces before operator

You can also make pycodestyle.py show the source code for each error, and even the relevant text from PEP 8:

$ pycodestyle --show-source --show-pep8 testing/data/E40.py
testing/data/E40.py:2:10: E401 multiple imports on one line
import os, sys
         ^
    Imports should usually be on separate lines.

    Okay: import os\nimport sys
    E401: import sys, os

Or you can display how often each error was found:

$ pycodestyle --statistics -qq Python-2.5/Lib
232     E201 whitespace after '['
599     E202 whitespace before ')'
631     E203 whitespace before ','
842     E211 whitespace before '('
2531    E221 multiple spaces before operator
4473    E301 expected 1 blank line, found 0
4006    E302 expected 2 blank lines, found 1
165     E303 too many blank lines (4)
325     E401 multiple imports on one line
3615    E501 line too long (82 characters)

You can also make pycodestyle.py show the error text in different formats by using --format having options default/pylint/custom:

$ pycodestyle testing/data/E40.py --format=default
testing/data/E40.py:2:10: E401 multiple imports on one line

$ pycodestyle testing/data/E40.py --format=pylint
testing/data/E40.py:2: [E401] multiple imports on one line

$ pycodestyle testing/data/E40.py --format='%(path)s|%(row)d|%(col)d| %(code)s %(text)s'
testing/data/E40.py|2|10| E401 multiple imports on one line

Variables in the custom format option

VariableSignificance
pathFile name
rowRow number
colColumn number
codeError code
textError text

Quick help is available on the command line:

$ pycodestyle -h
Usage: pycodestyle [options] input ...

Options:
  --version            show program's version number and exit
  -h, --help           show this help message and exit
  -v, --verbose        print status messages, or debug with -vv
  -q, --quiet          report only file names, or nothing with -qq
  --first              show first occurrence of each error
  --exclude=patterns   exclude files or directories which match these comma
                       separated patterns (default: .svn,CVS,.bzr,.hg,.git)
  --filename=patterns  when parsing directories, only check filenames matching
                       these comma separated patterns (default: *.py)
  --select=errors      select errors and warnings (e.g. E,W6)
  --ignore=errors      skip errors and warnings (e.g. E4,W)
  --show-source        show source code for each error
  --show-pep8          show text of PEP 8 for each error (implies --first)
  --statistics         count errors and warnings
  --count              print total number of errors and warnings to standard
                       error and set exit code to 1 if total is not null
  --max-line-length=n  set maximum allowed line length (default: 79)
  --max-doc-length=n   set maximum allowed doc line length and perform these
                       checks (unchecked if not set)
  --indent-size=n      set how many spaces make up an indent (default: 4)
  --hang-closing       hang closing bracket instead of matching indentation of
                       opening bracket's line
  --format=format      set the error format [default|pylint|<custom>]
  --diff               report only lines changed according to the unified diff
                       received on STDIN

  Testing Options:
    --benchmark        measure processing speed

  Configuration:
    The project options are read from the [pycodestyle] section of the
    tox.ini file or the setup.cfg file located in any parent folder of the
    path(s) being processed.  Allowed options are: exclude, filename,
    select, ignore, max-line-length, max-doc-length, hang-closing, count,
    format, quiet, show-pep8, show-source, statistics, verbose.

    --config=path      user config file location
    (default: ~/.config/pycodestyle)

The behaviour may be configured at two levels, the user and project levels.

At the user level, settings are read from the following locations:

If on Windows:

~\.pycodestyle

Otherwise, if the XDG_CONFIG_HOME environment variable is defined:

XDG_CONFIG_HOME/pycodestyle

Else if XDG_CONFIG_HOME is not defined:

~/.config/pycodestyle

Example:

[pycodestyle]
count = False
ignore = E226,E302,E71
max-line-length = 160
statistics = True

At the project level, a setup.cfg file or a tox.ini file is read if present. If none of these files have a [pycodestyle] section, no project specific configuration is loaded.

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