What’s the Best PEP8 Python Style Checker?

PEP8 is the official style guide for Python code. It was co-authored by Python creator Guido van Rossum so nobody doubts its validity.

The PEP8 standard consists of roughly 7500 words so it’s a lot work to study it thoroughly (but it’s worth it). Many Python coders just starting out don’t invest the time and start writing Python code right away…

… until they get bashed for “not writing Pythonic code” on an online forum such as Reddit or StackOverflow, or, worse, a code review at their company.

To help coders write more Pythonic code, there are three main Python style checkers available. These will be presented in this article:

Pythonchecker.com

PythonChecker is the most powerful and interactive Python code style checker on the web. Your code gets a style rank percentage that indicates how good your code is according to the PEP8 style guide. You can dynamically type in code and get small notifications and hints of how your code can be improved. If you follow the hints, your code will become cleaner and cleaner.

A big benefit is that the hints are written in an easy to understand language which is great for beginners who cannot really follow many of the standard warning messages thrown by compilers and interpreters.

Pep8online.com

PEP8Online is a great tool that adopts a minimalist approach. It’s minimal, reliable, and fast. Not much to add either.

The error messages come directly from the PEP8 environment so sometimes they can be hard to follow (for beginners).

PythonBuddy.com

Here’s a more powerful fullstack Python editor online that checks your syntax. However, the PEP8 style is not checked so I didn’t include it in this list initially.

However, I found it quite useful for scenarios where you want to run (and validate the correctness of) your Python code online. Definitely worth a look!

Summary

Currently, the best Python syntax checker is Pythonchecker.com. It’s most powerful, focuses on education, has understandable error messages, and has the clearest design (and it’s written by the Finxter team)!

Yet, you should also check the other two tools out and bookmark them for later usage—they are useful for online debugging and error checking which can easily become a daily activity for many coders.

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