Hidden Whitespace Best Practice

Question

I think most people agree that trailing whitespace is not good practice. A lot of editors will display it for you or automatically strip it out.

Consider this Python function as a simple example:

The extra whitespace on lines 11 and 13 are wrong. What I'm wondering about is line 10. Should a blank line inside a control block that doesn't change indentation have leading whitespace?

Most editors I've used will keep the cursor at the indentation level from the preceding line, so making a blank line without leading whitespace takes some extra formatting. What's the best practice? Should line 10 have leading whitespace or not?

Answer 1

When it comes to code execution it makes absolutely zero difference; the practice I have seen the most in python IS the one with white spaces, but I don't think anyone can really reasonably say one is objectively better than the other.