Some time ago, I started to look at Talos, the python performance testing framework for firefox that is usable on Windows, Mac and Linux.

Talos has been around for a long time, and has seen many contributors! Unfortunately the codebase reflects that, and as an example there was simply no common code style around for all the Python files.

Sometimes a 2 spaces based indentation, sometimes 4 spaces based, sometimes something else. No limit for the lines length. This end up with something that is really hard to read, understand and maintain. So one of my first goal was to try to clean this up.

And I heard about autopep8. As the name suggests, this is a tool (command line) that will automatically do some pep8 conversion on Python source files.

Awesome! I highly recommend that to you if you are trying to adapt the coding style of some Python code to pep8 convention, this worked really well for me. This is a pain to do that by hand, and almost impracticable when the indentation needs to be fixed, but autopep8 makes that for you in a safe way.

Tip: the –aggressive flag is really nice for fixing long lines.

So, as an example this is how I used autopep8 on talos:

autopep8 --recursive --in-place --aggressive --aggressive /path/to/talos

Simple and effective. See the usage documentation to see with an example what it really does and other command line flags.

https://parkouss.wordpress.com/2015/07/13/python-aggressive-pep8-conversion-using-autopep8-2/