On May 11, 6:56 am, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > There's a thing that bugs me in Python. Look at this... > > >>> print "Testing\" > > SyntaxError: EOL while scanning single-quoted string > > Please focus on the part of the error message that states "while > scanning single-quoted string". How can Python claim it scanned a > single-quoted string when I fed it with a double-quoted string? Is > quote type (single quote and double quote) recognition not implemented > in Python?
Read this: http://docs.python.org/ref/strings.html Try each of these: print 'Testing print 'Testing\' print 'Testing\'Testing print 'Testing' print 'Testing\'' print 'Testing\'Testing' There's a wrinkle that's common to both your questions: \" causes the " not to be regarded as (part of) the end marker but to be included as a data character. Similarly with '. Examples: >>> print "She said \"Hello!\"" She said "Hello!" >>> print 'His surname is "O\'Brien"' His surname is "O'Brien" >>> In the error message, "quoted" is the past tense of the verb "to quote", meaning to wrap a string of characters with a leading string and a trailing string to mark the contained string as a lexical item, typically a string constant. The message is intended to convey that the leading marker has been seen, but an EOL (end of line) was reached without seeing the trailing marker. A better error message might be something like "String constant not terminated at end of line". Unfortunately the above-mentioned documentation uses xxxxle-quote as a noun to describe characters -- IMHO this is colloquial and confusing; it should call ' an apostrophe, not a "single-quote", and all " a quote, not a "double-quote". The confusion is compounded by referring to '''abc''' and """xyz""" as triple-quoted strings ... so one might expect 'abc' and "xyz" to be called "single-quoted strings", and this sense is what is being used in the error message. HTH, John -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
