[Tutor] line continuation characters

Lisi lisi.reisz at gmail.com
Mon Jun 20 09:19:07 CEST 2011


On Monday 20 June 2011 00:03:47 Steven D'Aprano wrote:
> Lisi wrote:
> > I am having problems with line continuation characters.  Error message:
> >
> > SyntaxError: unexpected character after line continuation character
>
> Then delete it ;)
>
> Seriously. You have your editor open, right? Go to the line where the
> error is reported. It will look something like this:
>
> blah blah blah \
>
> Press the End key. Your editor's blinking insertion point or cursor will
> go to the end of the line:
>
> blah blah blah \  |
>
> Backspace until the cursor is *immediately* next to the backslash, with
> no other characters INCLUDING SPACES after it.
>
> Which editor are you using? If it is kwrite or kate, it has a setting to
> control whether spaces are left at the end of lines, e.g. in kwrite:
>
> Settings > Configure Editor > Editing > Remove trailing spaces
>
> > I have succeeded in moving the position of the complaint, but am
> > currently well and truly stuck.
> >
> > I have read up about it and now (I hope!) know what to do about it in
> > general, but at one particular point everywhere seems to be wrong.  Is
> > there any way I can make these wretched continuation characters visible,
> > so that I know where and what I am up against?
>
> Continuation characters are visible. It is a backslash at the very end
> of the line. It must not be followed by *anything* -- no comments, no
> spaces, nothing.
>
>  >>> x = 23 + \
>
>    File "<stdin>", line 1
>      x = 23 + \
>                ^
> SyntaxError: unexpected character after line continuation character
>
>
> If this error message is not clear, would you like to suggest an
> improvement?

It is not the error message that is unclear, it was the state of my knowledge.  
I did not know that \ was a line continuation character, and simply wrote a 
long line which wrapped.  I know how to remove spaces - I just had not got a 
clue what the message was on about.

I found quite a few references to line continuation characters, but nothing 
that told me what a line continuation character looked like, nor that it must 
be at the very end of the line.  The back-slashes in the script all had other 
purposes, and I had not realised that where they fell was significant.

Thanks for the help.  Now to tackle my script.

Lisi

Lisi




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