Built-in Formatters

By default Flake8 has two formatters built-in, default and pylint. These correspond to two classes Default and Pylint.

In Flake8 2.0, pep8 handled formatting of errors and also allowed users to specify an arbitrary format string as a parameter to --format. In order to allow for this backwards compatibility, Flake8 3.0 made two choices:

1. To not limit a user’s choices for --format to the format class names
2. To make the default formatter attempt to use the string provided by the user if it cannot find a formatter with that name.

Default Formatter

The Default continues to use the same default format string as pep8: '%(path)s:%(row)d:%(col)d: %(code)s %(text)s'.

To provide the default functionality it overrides two methods:

1. after_init
2. format

The former allows us to inspect the value provided to --format by the user and alter our own format based on that value. The second simply uses that format string to format the error.

class flake8.formatting.default.Default(options)

Default formatter for Flake8.

This also handles backwards compatibility for people specifying a custom format string.

after_init()

Check for a custom format string.

Pylint Formatter

The Pylint simply defines the default Pylint format string from pep8: '%(path)s:%(row)d: [%(code)s] %(text)s'.

class flake8.formatting.default.Pylint(options)

Pylint formatter for Flake8.