How to tell flake8 to ignore comments

Question

I'm using flake8 in emacs in order to clean up my python code. I find it annoying to have my comments flagged as errors (E501 line too long (x > 79 characters)). I'm wondering if anyone knows a way to kindly ask flake8 to ignore comments, both single and multi-line, but still let me know when my non-comment lines are too long?

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

I've figured out a possible solution to this, but there might be something better. If you write a comment that will raise an E501 error, i.e. it is too long, you can append that line with # noqa: E501, and flake8 will ignore it. For example:

# This is a really really long comment that would usually be flagged by flake8 because it is longer than 79 characters

would usually raise an E501, but

# This is a really really long comment that would usually be flagged by flake8 because it is longer than 79 characters # noqa: E501

will not.

documented here.

Answer 2

You can change the list of codes ignored by flake8 using a configuration file. For example, in your project directory create a file named .flake8 with the following content:

[flake8] per-file-ignores =     # line too long     path/to/file.py: E501, 

This may be easier than using # noqa comments.