ast module is combining string literals that are concatenated with plus operator into a single string in the parsestrplus module rather than maintaining the true syntax tree of the original document.

The fact that ast combines strings and does not maintain the original syntax of the document means that original syntax information is lost and a writer walking the abstract syntax tree is unable to reproduce the original syntax
of the document.

Hm, I'm going to close this as duplicate since a commenter in your previous issue clearly stated: "I don't think the AST module makes any guarantee about being able to reproduce the original source".

Also note that this probably mirrors the behavior of the actual compiler (I haven't checked).

By the way, if you want to talk about enhancing the AST module to be more useful to your use cases, the python-ideas mailing list would be the right place to raise the topic (you might want to look for earlier relevant discussions first, I'm pretty sure there have been a couple).

My thought on this is that a syntax tree needs to accurately represent parsed syntax of the code.  Two strings being concatenated contain syntax information that is different from a single string.

  "Hello" + " World"

Is not the same syntax as:

  "Hello World"

To lose that syntax information seems to defeat the intent of abstract syntax tree which is to store the syntax associated with a document.

"The fact that ast combines strings and does not maintain the original syntax of the document means that original syntax information is lost and a writer walking the abstract syntax tree is unable to reproduce the original syntax of the document."

You should take a look at the RedBaron project which implements a Python parser, provide a high-level representation of the code *and* allow to regenerates the Python code without loosing the indentation, comment, or anything else.

https://redbaron.readthedocs.org/en/latest/

"To achieve this, [RedBaron] is based on Baron a lossless AST for Python that guarantees the operation
fst_to_code(code_to_fst(source_code)) == source_code."