To end proposals for new syntax to do what they do for triple-quoted strings. Nick Coghlan gave reasons as follows: run time cost small, can be optimized away, would be used more than some other string methods.
http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-ideas/2013-July/021717.html

In response, Guido said "That's a compelling argument. Let's do it."
http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-ideas/2013-July/021718.html

It turns out there's one slight wrinkle in this grand plan: it won't work for docstrings without some additional tweaking to allow for method calls in the docstring detection.

>>> def f():
...     """example""".lower()
... 
>>> print(f.__doc__)
None
>>> import dis
>>> dis.dis(f)
  2           0 LOAD_CONST               1 ('example') 
              3 LOAD_ATTR                0 (lower) 
              6 CALL_FUNCTION            0 (0 positional, 0 keyword pair) 
              9 POP_TOP              
             10 LOAD_CONST               0 (None) 
             13 RETURN_VALUE

I still think the methods are worth adding regardless - I just anticipate a request to allow method calls on docstrings to follow not long after ;)

str already have too many methods. Who uses str.swapcase() or str.zfill() now? I'm -0.5 for adding any new str methods.

.dedent() is a no-brainer. JFDI. +1

.indent() I guess makes sense for symmetry, although I've rarely used it. -0

As for docstrings, I can imagine other alternatives, so let's let someone interested in that go through the PEP process.

IMO it’s fine that docstrings continue to live as pure string literals, and documentation tools continue to follow PEP-257’s advice.

If this goes ahead, would a bytes.dedent() method be also considered? I recently discovered that textwrap.dedent() does not work on bytes() in Python 3. I would have used it for the contents of an input file in a test case.

For the record there’s an older bpo-1237680 on this, rejected in 2005.

#81087 is a relating issue.

I implemented compile time cleandoc in #106411.
So this issue should be focus on str.dedent() and bytes.dedent().

textwrap.dedent() is complex function. I want to make str.dedent() much simpler.

• remove only whitespace -- user need to use textwrap.dedent() to support TAB indent
  • If we want to support TAB, we will add option later.
• both of bytes.dedent() and str.dedent() use same char* based logic -- str.dedent() uses utf-8. This minimize our maintenance cost.

I created a poll on discuss.python.org for naming.
https://discuss.python.org/t/str-dedent-vs-str-removeindent/30127

What is the status of this?

I need to write a PEP for this. But I don't have time for it for now.