'concatenating''strings'

[Bengt Richter]

On 8 Aug 2002 20:26:02 +0200, Chris Liechti <cliechti at gmx.net> wrote:

>hwlgw at hotmail.com (Will Stuyvesant) wrote in 
>news:cb035744.0208081004.589ed61 at posting.google.com:
>>>>> '''3'
>> KeyboardInterrupt
>>>>> # that did hang with the cursor on the next line so I had to press
>> CTRL-c
>
>you stared a triple quote string but not finished it.
>
>> Totally unimportant but unexpected behaviour.
>> Looks like you can not concatenate the empty string '' to 'something'
>> without using the + operator.
>
>thats documented behaviour:
>http://python.org/doc/current/ref/string-catenation.html
>
>likely stolen from C where this trick is important for macro magic. in 
>python its useful for longs strings to split them over multiple lines, 
>without including newlines (what a triple quote string would do)
But don't forget needing paren expression context to ignore new lines:
 >>> 'x'
 'x'
 >>> (
 ... 'x'
 ... 'y'
 ... )
 'xy'
 >>> (
 ... 'x'
 ...       'y' # or indent and comment as desired
 ... )
 'xy'

But as mentioned, triple quotes include the \n's
 >>> '''
 ... x
 ... y
 ... '''
 '\nx\ny\n'

Regards,
Bengt Richter