Is there a way to avoid "expected indent block" errors in Python without adding pass to a function?
def exclamation(s):
# s += "!!!"
# return s
print exclamation("The indented horror")
The above code results in an error on line 5. Yes, remove the comments and the code works fine. However, in debugging stuff I often find myself in a similar situation. Is this just a hang-up of the off-side rule and something I need to get used to or are there ways around this?
There has to be something within your function definition to avoid a SyntaxError.
The issue is that the interpreter will effectively ignore comments during parsing, and so while to a human it might look like something is there, to the parser it is empty.
As jonrsharpe has pointed out in a comment, you can use docstrings to "comment out" your code and have it still work. This is because the docstring is, in effect, a normal string. As such this will be parsed and won't cause a SyntaxError. To take your example code it would look like:
def exclamation(s):
'''s += "!!!"
return s'''
# This should print None as nothing is now returned from the func
print(exclamation("The indented horror"))
"""then the function will compile.