line break confusion

[Piet van Oostrum]

>>>>> Michael Mell <mike at nthwave.net> (MM) writes:

MM> In the string module, whitespace = ' \t\n\r\v\f' (5 characters here).
MM> Yet, when I run this:
>>>> import string
>>>> for c in string.whitespace:
>>>> print '.'+ c + '.'

MM> I get 7 results.
MM> What's going on here?

You are counting wrong.
Fist, as aomeone else already noticed, the string contains 6 characters. On
my system they are even in a different order. Try 
print string.whitespace.encode('hex') if your python isn't too old.

And then you will get more lines than 6. The \n, \v and \f will probably
get two dots on separate lines each. The \r will rpobably print one dot
only because the second dot overprints the first one. So you should get 11
dots together.
-- 
Piet van Oostrum <piet at cs.uu.nl>
URL: http://www.cs.uu.nl/~piet [PGP]
Private email: P.van.Oostrum at hccnet.nl