Skip to content

line-too-long (E501)#

Derived from the pycodestyle linter.

What it does#

Checks for lines that exceed the specified maximum character length.

Why is this bad?#

Overlong lines can hurt readability. PEP 8, for example, recommends limiting lines to 79 characters. By default, this rule enforces a limit of 88 characters for compatibility with Black, though that limit is configurable via the line-length setting.

In the interest of pragmatism, this rule makes a few exceptions when determining whether a line is overlong. Namely, it:

  1. Ignores lines that consist of a single "word" (i.e., without any whitespace between its characters).
  2. Ignores lines that end with a URL, as long as the URL starts before the line-length threshold.
  3. Ignores line that end with a pragma comment (e.g., # type: ignore or # noqa), as long as the pragma comment starts before the line-length threshold. That is, a line will not be flagged as overlong if a pragma comment causes it to exceed the line length. (This behavior aligns with that of the Ruff formatter.)

If pycodestyle.ignore-overlong-task-comments is true, this rule will also ignore comments that start with any of the specified task-tags (e.g., # TODO:).

Example#

my_function(param1, param2, param3, param4, param5, param6, param7, param8, param9, param10)

Use instead: 

my_function(
    param1, param2, param3, param4, param5,
    param6, param7, param8, param9, param10
)

Options#