Add line return to a block of text, but don't break words

Question

I have a long string like:

mystring = 'It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness...'''

And I'd like to insert a linebreak every 20 letters. Except I don't want to split a word in half, so if it splits at 22 letters, that's fine. Does anyone know of an intelligent solution to this?

Answer 1

Use textwrap :

>>> mystring = 'It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness...'''
>>> import textwrap
>>> textwrap.wrap(mystring, width=20)
['It was the best of', 'times, it was the', 'worst of times, it', 'was the age of', 'wisdom, it was the', 'age of', 'foolishness...']