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Unwanted newlines being added to output.

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#48 5 comments 2 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

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Assessment

Difficulty
3/5
Estimated time
1-2 days
Newbie friendliness
35/100
Issue type
Bug
Clarity
Mostly clear
Activity status
Stale
Tech stack
python
Domain
tooling

Research direction

Start with the provided Python reproducer and trace how tomlkit serializes tables after nested tables are added. Compare the round-trip and changed outputs, then add a regression test covering the newline behavior; done means table spacing follows the explicitly constructed structure without surprising extra newlines.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

I want to group my tables:

[first]
foo = 5
bar = 20
[first.a.b.c]
alice = 10
bob = 30

[second]       
foo = 3
bar = 21
[second.a.b.c]
alice = 15
bob = 3543

When I try to manually construct this, I instead get

[first]
foo = 5
bar = 20

[first.a.b.c]
alice = 10
bob = 30


[second]       
foo = 3
bar = 21

[second.a.b.c]
alice = 15
bob = 3543

I expected no newlines to be added for me and explicitly called out a newline between [first.a.b.c] table and [second]. Newlines being added surprised me and made made me wonder if tomlkit was properly preserving the lack of newlines but it seems to.

So I created the following test case to experiment with how newlines are dealt with

import tomlkit

t = tomlkit.loads("""[first]
foo = 5
bar = 20
[first.a.b.c]
alice = 10
bob = 30
[second]
foo = 3
bar = 21
[second.a.b.c]
alice = 15
bob = 3543""")

print("Round-trip")
print("```toml")
print(tomlkit.dumps(t))
print("```")
print()

t["second"].add("extra", tomlkit.table())
t["second"].add("extra1", tomlkit.table())
three = tomlkit.table()
three["foo"] = 2
three["bar"] = 1
child = tomlkit.table()
child["alice"] = 3
child["bob"] = 10
three["child"] = child
t["three"] = three


print("Changed")
print("```toml")
print(tomlkit.dumps(t))
print("```")
print()

The output is:
Round-trip

[first]
foo = 5
bar = 20
[first.a.b.c]
alice = 10
bob = 30
[second]
foo = 3
bar = 21
[second.a.b.c]
alice = 15
bob = 3543

Changed

[first]
foo = 5
bar = 20
[first.a.b.c]
alice = 10
bob = 30
[second]
foo = 3
bar = 21
[second.a.b.c]
alice = 15
bob = 3543
[second.extra]

[second.extra1]

[three]
foo = 2
bar = 1

[three.child]
alice = 3
bob = 10

I was surprised that second.extra didn't have a newline before it but second.extra1 did. I imagine this just shows how the newlines are being auto-added but it is still surprising.

Dominant language
Python
Stars
850
Forks
163
Avg merge
13m
Merged PRs (30d)
2

Contributor guide

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First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

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