in Lua 5.2+, there's this string escape that allows you to put "whitespace" (in particular, including newlines) in a string literal, by skipping them entirely. now, unlike lua's long strings, python *does* have escapes in long strings. however, sometimes you have help text: "switches to toml config format. the old 'repos' " #cont "table is preserved as 'repos_old'" and... well yeah you can see what I did to make it work. if I used a long string here, I'd get a newline and a bunch of indentation in the middle. so I propose a \z string escape which lets me write the above as shown below: """switches to toml config format. the old 'repos' \z table is preserved as 'repos_old'""" (side note to avoid unnecessary comments: this help text refers to database tables and migrations. it's not about lua tables.)