On Thu, 15 Aug 2013 02:46:20 -0700, wxjmfauth wrote:
> A technical ascpect of triple quoted strings is that the "end of lines"
> are not respected.
>
>>>> import zzz
>>>> zzz.__doc__
> 'abc\ndef\n'
You are misinterpreting what you are seeing. You are not reading lines of
text from a file. You are importing a module, and they accessing its
__doc__ attribute. The relationship between the module object and text
from a file is tenuous, at best:
- the module's file could use \n line endings, or \r, or \r\n, or even
something else, depending on the platform;
- the module might be a compiled .pyc file, and there are no lines of
text to read, just byte code;
- or a .dll or .so library, again, no lines of text, just compiled code;
- or there might not even be a file, like the sys module, which is
entirely built into the interpreter;
- or it might not even be a module object, you can put anything into
sys.module. It might be an instance with docstrings computed on the fly.
So you can't conclude *anything* about text files from the fact that
module docstrings typically contain only \n rather than \r\n line
endings. Modules are not necessarily text files, and even when they are,
once you import them, what you get is *not text*, but Python objects.
>>>> with open('zzz.py', 'rb') as fo:
> ... r = fo.read()
> ...
>>>> r
> b'"""abc\r\ndef\r\n"""\r\n'
And again, you are misinterpreting what you are seeing. By opening the
file in binary mode, you are instructing Python to treat it as binary
bytes, and return *exactly* what is stored on disk. If you opened the
file in text mode, you would (likely, but not necessarily) get a very
different result: the string would contain only \n line endings.
Python is not a low-level language like C. If you expect it to behave
like a low-level language like C, you will be confused and upset.
But to prove that you are mistaken, we can do this:
py> s = """Triple-quote string\r
... containing carriage-return+newline line\r
... endings."""
py> s
'Triple-quote string\r\ncontaining carriage-return+newline line\r
\nendings.'
--
Steven
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