PEP8 and SciPy

All SciPy Python code should adhere to PEP8 style guidelines. It’s so important that some continuous integration tests on GitHub will fail due to certain PEP8 violations. Here are a few tips for ensuring PEP8 compliance before pushing your code:

• Many integrated development environments (IDEs) have options that automatically check for PEP8 compliance. In Spyder, for example, enable Real-time code style analysis in Tools → Preferences → Editor → Code Introspection/Analysis and “Automatically remove trailing spaces when saving files” in in Tools → Preferences → Editor → Advanced Settings. This can help you fix PEP8 issues as you write your code.

• You can also perform checks using the flake8 tool. After installing flake8, navigate to the SciPy root directory in a console window and try:

  flake8 scipy/optimize/linprog.py
  

  The absence of output indicates that there are no PEP8 issues with the file. Unfortunately, there is also no output if you get the file path wrong:

  flake8 scipy/optimize/linprog2.py
  

  (linprog2.py doesn’t exist.) To make sure you have the path right, consider introducing (and then removing) a small PEP8 issue in the target file, such as a line that is over 79 characters long.

• If you have existing code with a lot of PEP8 issues, consider using autopep8 to automatically fix most of them.