pep8 is a tool to check your Python code against some of the style conventions in PEP 8.

There’s also a package for Debian/Ubuntu, but it’s not always the latest version.

You can install, upgrade, uninstall pep8.py with these commands:

Example usage and output

$ pep8 --first optparse.py optparse.py:69:11: E401 multiple imports on one line optparse.py:77:1: E302 expected 2 blank lines, found 1 optparse.py:88:5: E301 expected 1 blank line, found 0 optparse.py:222:34: W602 deprecated form of raising exception optparse.py:347:31: E211 whitespace before '(' optparse.py:357:17: E201 whitespace after '{' optparse.py:472:29: E221 multiple spaces before operator optparse.py:544:21: W601 .has_key() is deprecated, use 'in'

You can also make pep8.py show the source code for each error, and even the relevant text from PEP 8:

$ pep8 --show-source --show-pep8 testsuite/E40.py testsuite/E40.py:2:10: E401 multiple imports on one line import os, sys ^ Imports should usually be on separate lines. Okay: import os

import sys E401: import sys, os

Or you can display how often each error was found:

$ pep8 --statistics -qq Python-2.5/Lib 232 E201 whitespace after '[' 599 E202 whitespace before ')' 631 E203 whitespace before ',' 842 E211 whitespace before '(' 2531 E221 multiple spaces before operator 4473 E301 expected 1 blank line, found 0 4006 E302 expected 2 blank lines, found 1 165 E303 too many blank lines (4) 325 E401 multiple imports on one line 3615 E501 line too long (82 characters) 612 W601 .has_key() is deprecated, use 'in' 1188 W602 deprecated form of raising exception