Blank line Python PEP8 best practice in class definition [closed]

Question

I always leave a blank line after class definition and the code seems to be PEP8 compliant, as no warning is raised for this. I do this because I found it more readable than writing all together.

class Area(BaseModel):

    name = models.CharField(_("Name"), max_length=30)
    slug = models.SlugField(_("Slug"), max_length=30, unique=True)

    class Meta(BaseModel.Meta):

        verbose_name = _("Area")
        verbose_name_plural = _("Areas")
        ordering = [
            "name",
        ]

However, when I read PEP8 code compliant. This extra space is never there and this code would look like this:

class Area(BaseModel):
    name = models.CharField(_("Name"), max_length=30)
    slug = models.SlugField(_("Slug"), max_length=30, unique=True)

    class Meta(BaseModel.Meta):
        verbose_name = _("Area")
        verbose_name_plural = _("Areas")
        ordering = [
            "name",
        ]

My question is: Is that a "bad practice" what I'm doing. Should I avoid this extra blank lines in Python?

Answer 1

This is really a matter of taste. I personally include the blank line to be consisted with classes which have a docstring. Quoting PEP-0257:

Insert a blank line before and after all docstrings (one-line or multi-line) that document a class -- generally speaking, the class's methods are separated from each other by a single blank line, and the docstring needs to be offset from the first method by a blank line; for symmetry, put a blank line between the class header and the docstring.

To illustrate:

class WithoutDocString(object):

    def __init__(self):
        pass


class WithADocString(object):

    """Summary line.

    Bla bla bla bla.
    """

    def __init__(self):
        pass