On May 24, 6:41 pm, grocery_stocker <cdal...@gmail.com> wrote: > How come something like '\' causes an error? Here is what I mean. > > [cdal...@localhost ~]$ python > Python 2.6.2 (r262:71600, May 3 2009, 17:04:44) > [GCC 4.1.1 20061011 (Red Hat 4.1.1-30)] on linux2 > Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.>>> > print "test \" > > File "<stdin>", line 1 > print "test \" > ^ > SyntaxError: EOL while scanning string literal > > > > I mean, isn't the '\' a character just like the letter 't'?
Ask yourself: 'How would I tell Python to print the " character when it's used as the string delimitation character?'. Unlike us (you probably didn't even blink at the usage of ' in "it's" versus its usage as quote delimiters in that sentence), computers can't quite tell usage from context. So you have to come up with a way to express ourselves. Many languages use the \ character as an escape character, which modifies the meaning of the next character in a string. \n, \t, \" are all common. Other languages use other conventions -- I program ABAP professionally, and it uses ' as the string delimiter, and '' as a literal -- so a string with one single ' is expressed as ''''. The python interpreter isn't doing any bit magic here, it's just reading a \ character followed by a " character and changing its interpretation of " appropriately. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
