multiline strings and proper indentation/alignment

Tue May 9 14:03:31 EDT 2006

John Salerno wrote:
> How do you make a single string span multiple lines, but also allow 
> yourself to indent the second ... without causing the newlines and 
> tabs or spaces to be added to the string as well?
 >
> self.DTD = '''<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN"\n
>            "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">\n\n'''
> 
> ..., but I don't want the extra newline or tabs to be 
> a part of the string when it's printed.

The easiest way:

     self.DTD = ('<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN"\n'
                 '"http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">\n\n')

Adjacent strings are combined at compile-time, and parens around allows
you to do a multi-line expression.

--Scott David Daniels
scott.daniels at acm.org