tpc at csua.berkeley.edu wrote:
> hi Karl, I am sorry, when I said a block of code that already has print
> statements in it, I meant print statements using quotes. Take for example
> a small program I wrote yesterday to be run from the commandline:
>
> <code>
> #!/usr/bin/env python
>
> def dec2hexconverter(x):
> hexstring = hex(x).replace('0x', '').replace('L', '').upper()
> length = len(hexstring)
> if length == 1:
> hexstring = '000' + hexstring
> """elif length == 2:
> hexstring = '00' + hexstring
> elif length == 3:
> hexstring = '0' + hexstring"""
> elif length == 8:
> hexstring = hexstring[:4] + ' ' + hexstring[-4:]
> print hexstring
>
> dec2hexconverter(3735928559)
> </code>
>
> As it is, when you run it Python gives you a syntax error. When you take
> out the triple quotes it runs just fine. This is not the most elegant
> code, but the issue of nesting quotes remains, you cannot do so in Python
> just as you cannot nest multiline comments in Java or C.
This is actually not throwing a syntax error because of the embedded
quotes -- it's perfectly legal to embed quote characters within a
triple-quoted string, and indeed that's half the motivation for
allowing triple-quoted strings -- """A bit of "this" and a bit of
'that'""" is a perfectly legal string.
The problem here is that your string is not *actually* a comment, and
on going through this, the parser writes code to create and then throw
away that string. Then you have an 'elif:' ... which is separated
from the 'if' by a different statement, and thus is bare. *That* is
where your syntax error is coming from.
As others have noted, most editors will have block-comment features
that will allow you to comment out multiple lines at once (and
uncomment them later), so that's the "correct" way to accomplish this.
Jeff Shannon
Technician/Programmer
Credit International