Comment Formatter for Python

Comment formatter automatically restructures comments in your code to be compliant with line length standards.

def foo():
    def bar():
       # Here we have a very long block comment that is not evenly spaced. We see that some lines are very long,
       # while
       # others are
       # very short.
       #
       # We want to reformat this while preserving the comment structure

Converts to

def foo():
    def bar():
       # Here we have a very long block comment that is not evenly spaced. We see that some lines are
       # very long, while others are very short.
       #
       # We want to reformat this while preserving the comment structure

Installation

pip install comment-formatter

Usage

python -m comment_formatter.run /path/to/my/files [--line-length X] [--check]

If the check flag is passed, the script will log an error and exit 1 instead of reformatting files.

Why Comment Formatter

When I use multiline block comments in my code, I often go back and edit them later, which means I'm left with lines of uneven length that may exceed linter line limits.

Since I use emacs which doesn't (to my knowledge) support reformatting comments to be compliant with line length standards, I wrote comment formatter to do this for me.

How it Works

Comment formatter starts by grouping together comments in a blocks like

# This is a
# comment block
#
# This is a separate block to maintain formatting

if x == 5:
    pass
    # This comment
# is a separate block from this because of indentation

After computing the blocks, comment formatter makes a best effort attempt to squash the blocks together given line length constraints. Splitting is only done on spaces, so very long words that do not fit in a single line will not be reformatter.