o_18ufhmfmq19t513t3lgmn5l1qa8a.pdf

CHAPTER 1 ■ INSTANT HACKING: THE BASICS 27
Long Strings
If you want to write a really long string, one that spans several lines, you can use triple quotes
instead of ordinary quotes:
print '''This is a very long string.
It continues here.
And it's not over yet.
"Hello, world!"
Still here.'''
You can also use triple double quotes, """like this""". Note that because of the distinctive
enclosing quotes, both single and double quotes are allowed inside, without being backslashescaped.
■Tip Ordinary strings can also span several lines. If the last character on a line is a backslash, the line break
itself is “escaped,” and is ignored. For example:
print "Hello, \
world!"
would print out Hello, world!. The same goes for expressions and statements in general:
>>> 1 + 2 + \
4 + 5
12
>>> print \
'Hello, world'
Hello, world
Raw Strings
Raw strings aren’t too picky about backslashes, which can be very useful sometimes. 10 In ordinary
strings, the backslash has a special role: It escapes things, letting you put things into your
string that you couldn’t normally write directly. For example, a new line is written \n, and can
be put into a string like this:
>>> print 'Hello,\nworld!'
Hello,
world!
This is normally just dandy, but in some cases it’s not what you want. What if you wanted the
string to include a backslash followed by an n? You might want to put the DOS pathname
C:\nowhere into a string, for example:
10. Especially when writing regular expressions. More about those in Chapter 10.