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)[source]

Default formatter for Flake8.

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

after_init()[source]

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)[source]

Pylint formatter for Flake8.