How to automatically clean your modified code?

In this post I will show you some of my ideas to fix Python code style in repositories that haven’t used code formatters so far. Without them, the files content may be difficult to read, especially when developed by many users. I will tell you about the ways to find modified files in the current working branch with git ls-files and git diff. Then, I will explain how to run several cleaning commands like flake8 and black with xargs to clean the code. Although the last one comes from Linux systems, Windows users are able to use it as well.

TLDR: If you want to just see the solution, without reading the whole article, scroll down to the Summary section.

If you do care about those small things that make code more readable, then you probably heard about tools like black or isort. You can use them to format code and sort imports. It's possible to use in a given file as well as to recursively cleanup all files in a given directory.

So what you can do in case you would like to fix files you changed when developing a new feature? Well, there are few options:

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