Greg> I wouldn't like to see any guideline that said you should only use Greg> double quotes or something like that. It might be useful to have a wiki page which identified some of the conventions people use. Skip

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On May 12, 2008, at 5:16 PM, Benji York wrote:

On Sat, May 10, 2008 at 10:51 PM, wrote:

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It might be useful to have a wiki page which identified some of the conventions people use.

One such entry could be "Do what python does.":

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'I am a string.' 'I am a string.' "I'm a string" "I'm a string"

Nice. :) - -Barry -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.9 (Darwin) iQCVAwUBSCi2mnEjvBPtnXfVAQJWHAP/b/2Yebt7abj+UuysjYFgzetl+26SFSFo jXq/JZUnieIhaiCwMkJW8BW8QmxtkCn3EPDf7VUgMhxMmxDLMQ5Ougzk+/Mq5JLs VM5zJ7kFRU4kBKReGumobSxOMUnteWNYCeUcpUDRHzEEGWFaRM0luNWUiN09iWin DYDvVS5nSCw= =/vGr -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

Python itself doesn't appear to follow that principle:

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"Ain't nothin' stoppin' this from usin' \"double quotes\"." 'Ain\'t nothin\' stoppin\' this from usin\' "double quotes".'

IMHO it's a useful rule of thumb, but like most of the other alternatives presented in this thread, taken to extremes, it can get silly. (Imagine a string with 10 's and 9 "s, and adding two more "s to it...) But I suppose that's another reason these are just guidelines. Dave Borowitz On Mon, May 12, 2008 at 5:00 PM, wrote:

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"Benji" == Benji York writes:

Benji> One such entry could be "Do what python does.":

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'I am a string.' 'I am a string.' "I'm a string" "I'm a string"

That would be the principle of fewest backslashes. ;-)

Skip _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/ddborowitz%40gmail.com

-- It is better to be quotable than to be honest. -Tom Stoppard Borowitz

On Sun, 11 May 2008, Greg Ewing wrote:

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While Python doesn't have a char type (yet), I still find the distinction between 'c' and "abc" useful to show intent (especially given my C background

The way I tend to use them is that "xxx" is for data operated on by the program and seen by the user, and 'xxx' is for things that are only used internally, e.g. enumerated type values and attribute names for use by getattr().

I find myself doing something similar. I use '' for anything that is a dictionary key and "" for things that are strings not meant to be used for indexing, in particular the things that are looked up. Except when I don't. When I am generating HTML using the ll.xist library, which uses constructs like this: html.a (u'link text', href="http://url.goes.here/") I have just started using '' for text element contents and "" for attribute values. This way the attribute values (keyword parameters) look almost the exact same as in actual HTML (only difference is the commas) (and the escaping), and my editor seems to be designed for C-style languages where '' are for character constants and "" are for strings so it highlights them differently. My personal opinion is that one should not use the different quoting styles at random, but I am inclined to believe that there is no single guideline that can apply to everybody. Isaac Morland CSCF Web Guru DC 2554C, x36650 WWW Software Specialist