More About Strings

String Delimiters

• Double quotes (”…”) or single quotes (’…’)

• No difference

  'spam eggs'
  

  'spam eggs'
  

  "spam eggs"
  

  'spam eggs'
  

• Single quote (') embedded as literal character inside a string delimited with single quotes ⟶ escaping needed

  'doesn\'t'
  

  "doesn't"
  

• Alternative: choose double quote as string delimiter

  "doesn't"
  

  "doesn't"
  

• Or, the other way around

  '"Yes," he said.'
  

  '"Yes," he said.'
  

• No way out though if both double and single quotes need to be part of a string

  '"Isn\'t," she said.'
  

  '"Isn\'t," she said.'
  

Escape Sequences

• Newline, embedded in string

  print('first line\nsecond line')
  

  first line
  second line
  

More (but not all) escape sequences …

Escape character	Meaning
\n	Linefeed
\r	Carriage return
\t	Tab
\b	Backspace
\0	ASCII 0
\130	ASCII dec. 88 (‘X’) in octal
\x58	ASCII dec. 88 (‘X’) in hexadecimal

Raw Strings

• Unwanted escaping (Doze pathnames) …

  print('C:\some\name')
  print(r'C:\some\name')
  

  C:\some
  ame
  C:\some\name
  

• Unwanted escaping (regular expressions)

  import re
  regex = re.compile(r'^(.*)\.(\d+)$')
  

Multiline Strings

Escaping newlines is no fun …

print("""\
Bummer!
You messed it up!
""")

Bummer!
You messed it up!

will produce …

Bummer!
You messed it up!

• Note how the initial newline is escaped ⟶ line continuation

• Newline must immediately follow backslash

More String Tricks

• String literal concatenation

  'Hello' ' ' 'World'
  

  'Hello World'
  

• String literal concatenation (multiple lines)

  ('Hello'
  ' '
  'World')
  

  'Hello World'