title: Wrapping lines in python: breaking on an argument string
body: <p>I have a script in which a very long argument of type <code>str</code> is passed to a function:</p>
  
  <pre><code>parser = argparse.ArgumentParser(description='Auto-segments a text based on the TANGO algorithm (Rie Kubota Ando and Lillian Lee, "Mostly-Unsupervised Statistical Segmentation of Japanese Kanji Sequences" (Natural Language Engineering, 9(2):127-149, 2003)).')
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I'd like to limit line length in this script to 79 chars, which means line breaking in the middle of the string in question. Simply wrapping at 79 yields something like this, which is syntactically ill-formed:</p>
  
  <pre><code>parser = argparse.ArgumentParser(description="Auto-segments a text based on 
      the TANGO algorithm (Rie Kubota Ando and Lillian Lee, 'Mostly-Unsupervis
      ed Statistical Segmentation of Japanese Kanji Sequences' (Natural Langua
      ge Engineering, 9(2):127-149, 2003)).")
  </code></pre>
  
  <p><a href="http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0008/#maximum-line-length" rel="nofollow noreferrer">PEP 8</a> has guidelines for breaking lines in various non-argument-string-internal locations, but is there a way to break the line in the middle of an argument string?</p>
  
  <p>(Related but less important question: What is a sensible/conventional way to break natural language text mid-word inside a (python) script?)</p>