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.
SciPy makes use of special configuration files for linting with the flake8 tool.
It is typically recommended to leave any existing style issues alone unless they are part of the code you’re already modifying. This practice ensures that the codebase is gradually cleaned up without dedicating precious review time to style-only cleanups. Before sending a Pull Request, we suggest running the lint tests only for the changes you’ve made in your feature branch. This will mimic the continuous integration linting checks setup on GitHub. After installing flake8, you can run the following check locally in the SciPy root directory to ensure your Pull Request doesn’t break the Continuous Integration linting tests.
```
python tools/lint_diff.py
```
If you want to run the diff based lint tests only for specific files or directories, please consider using the --files option.
```
python tools/lint_diff.py --files scipy/odr/models.py scipy/ndimage
```
If you have existing code with a lot of PEP8 issues, consider using autopep8 to automatically fix them before incorporating the code into SciPy.