Related
Why would we want to use escape sequence characters like for example in this Python code:
print('It\'s alright.')
Why are we using this backslash to print a single quote when we can accomplish the same by using:
print("it's alright")
This is useful because you can do:
txt = 'in python you can have \'string\' or "string"'
print(txt)
No matter how many different kinds of quote you have, you may still need an escape mechanism now and then. Consider this:
If you want to use Python's "multiline string literal" you have to begin it and end it with a triple quote, which can be either """ or '''.
To put that into a string literal you are going to have to quote ' or ":
a = 'If you want to use Python\'s "multiline string literal" you have to begin it and end it with a triple quote, which can be either """ or \'\'\'.'.
a = "If you want to use Python's \"multiline string literal\" you have to begin it and end it with a triple quote, which can be either \"\"\" or '''."
a = """If you want to use Python's "multiline string literal" you have to begin it and end it with a triple quote, which can be either ""\" or '''."""
Having different quote types is a great programming convenience, making it easier and less error prone to put quotes and apostrophes in the data without having to jump through hoops. But it can't cover every case. If you need to convince yourself of this, experiment with those three lines at a command prompt and see if you can come up with a way to avoid backslashes. You will find you always need at least one.
Without further context, I can only take a guess and say that the person who wrote the first example, didn't know or wasn't aware of the fact that it's possible to use double-quotes "" for string literals in Python.
That's just a matter of style. Some people like to use single quotes to create string literals, and therefore they'll have to escape any single quotes it comes inside of their strings (same for double quotes). The following will raise a SyntaxError:
s = 'It's gonna be alright!'
s = "They used to call me "Big" but I was 4ft!"
So you may ask why they don't use " when their string have single quotes and ' when their string have double quotes? Yes, they can, but there are some unavoidable situations, such as Regex:
regexp = r"["']\w+["']"
Note that they can't use neither single nor double quotes to create the string, since both are present in the Regex. Therefore, they'll need to escape it.
In this case its not needed cuz you have used " " for the print statement.
case1) use: print(" It's alright.")
case2) use: print(' It\'s alright.')
Note the parenthesis used for the print statements.
You cant use ' directly in case2 cuz python would think that the string ends causing a SyntaxError.
In the code
txt = 'It\'s alright.'
you need the backslash(\) so python understands that the second apostrophe is a character of the string. Without the backslash, Python would interpret it as the character used to mark the end of the string.
When you use a ' at the start, python looks for a matching ' and considers whatever is present in between these quotes as a string.
But if you use a ' in the middle of the string, python considers that as the end of the string. And since there is no matching ' for the ' at the end of the string that results in a SyntaxError
The backslash () character is used to escape characters that otherwise have a special meaning, such as newline, backslash itself, or the quote character.
Refer the docs: https://docs.python.org/3/reference/lexical_analysis.html#string-and-bytes-literals
I'm new to python and things do not always work as I expect... but I am learning, slowly. Here is a case in point. If I randomly create a string via:
thing = ''.join([
random.SystemRandom().choice(
"{}{}{}".format(
string.ascii_letters, string.digits, string.punctuation
)
) for i in range(63)
])
then I could end up with a string with single quotes as well as backslashes. I assume that I should then go through the string and quote the possibly problematic characters. So, for example: if I generate the (short) string:
cs]b77e\IM>&4/,u.s_jr"xmMdHD7a'wrEw(
my instinct tells me that I should quote that into:
cs]b77e\\IM>&4/,u.s_jr"xmMdHD7a\'wrEw(
It looks like the string.replace() method is my friend...
thing = ''.join([
random.SystemRandom().choice(
"{}{}{}".format(
string.ascii_letters, string.digits, string.punctuation
)
) for i in range(63)
]).replace('\\', '\\').replace('\'', '\'')
but is there a better way?
Also, in the replace() methods the meaning of the single quoted strings seems to change depending on context. Coming from Perl this seems strange to me. My initial attempts had me doing things like replace('\\', '\\\\') thinking that I had to quote the characters going into the replacement string. Is this normal or am I missing something else?
Edit
My goal here is to end up with 63 characters in a string. I don't really think that I have to quote any generated single quotes but my thought is that if I later use the string and it has generated backslashes then the next character after the backslash would act like it was quoted, right? I mean:
len('1234')
yields 4 but
len('12\4')
yields 3 so I need to post-process the generated string to at least quote the backslashes, right? Is there a better way to quote problematic characters than a chain of replaces() methods?
A string can contain any valid characters; the quotes and backslashes are only useful or special when representing a string in Python code. So you don't normally need to do anything like this when you already have a string which contains the characters you want.
If you want a representation which can be parsed by Python (e.g. by writing it to a .py file), repr() does that.
You don't have to escape characters unless they are part of code you are writing or from an input from a user. If the backslash character or a quote character is generated by a Python program, then it is already stored as that character in memory. There is no need do any additional escaping.
Why? Because Python is not interpreting a string literal, it is simply generating characters, which are stored as numbers in memory. When you ask Python to display a string containing one of the characters such as a single quote or a backslash, it will automatically escape them.
Here is an example. A double quote is 34, single quote is character 39, and backslash is 92.
'a'+chr(34)+'b'+chr(39)+'c'+chr(92)+'d'
# returns:
'a"b\'c\\d'
Because I included a double quote and a single quote Python will use a single quote to surround the string, an unescaped double quote within the string, an escaped single quote, and and escaped backslash.
So there is no need to escape characters that are generated within a Python program, it does it for you.
Technically, any odd number of backslashes, as described in the documentation.
>>> r'\'
File "<stdin>", line 1
r'\'
^
SyntaxError: EOL while scanning string literal
>>> r'\\'
'\\\\'
>>> r'\\\'
File "<stdin>", line 1
r'\\\'
^
SyntaxError: EOL while scanning string literal
It seems like the parser could just treat backslashes in raw strings as regular characters (isn't that what raw strings are all about?), but I'm probably missing something obvious.
The whole misconception about python's raw strings is that most of people think that backslash (within a raw string) is just a regular character as all others. It is NOT. The key to understand is this python's tutorial sequence:
When an 'r' or 'R' prefix is present, a character following a
backslash is included in the string without change, and all
backslashes are left in the string
So any character following a backslash is part of raw string. Once parser enters a raw string (non Unicode one) and encounters a backslash it knows there are 2 characters (a backslash and a char following it).
This way:
r'abc\d' comprises a, b, c, \, d
r'abc\'d' comprises a, b, c, \, ', d
r'abc\'' comprises a, b, c, \, '
and:
r'abc\' comprises a, b, c, \, ' but there is no terminating quote now.
Last case shows that according to documentation now a parser cannot find closing quote as the last quote you see above is part of the string i.e. backslash cannot be last here as it will 'devour' string closing char.
The reason is explained in the part of that section which I highlighted in bold:
String quotes can be escaped with a
backslash, but the backslash remains
in the string; for example, r"\"" is a
valid string literal consisting of two
characters: a backslash and a double
quote; r"\" is not a valid string
literal (even a raw string cannot end
in an odd number of backslashes).
Specifically, a raw string cannot end
in a single backslash (since the
backslash would escape the following
quote character). Note also that a
single backslash followed by a newline
is interpreted as those two characters
as part of the string, not as a line
continuation.
So raw strings are not 100% raw, there is still some rudimentary backslash-processing.
That's the way it is! I see it as one of those small defects in python!
I don't think there's a good reason for it, but it's definitely not parsing; it's really easy to parse raw strings with \ as a last character.
The catch is, if you allow \ to be the last character in a raw string then you won't be able to put " inside a raw string. It seems python went with allowing " instead of allowing \ as the last character.
However, this shouldn't cause any trouble.
If you're worried about not being able to easily write windows folder pathes such as c:\mypath\ then worry not, for, you can represent them as r"C:\mypath", and, if you need to append a subdirectory name, don't do it with string concatenation, for it's not the right way to do it anyway! use os.path.join
>>> import os
>>> os.path.join(r"C:\mypath", "subfolder")
'C:\\mypath\\subfolder'
In order for you to end a raw string with a slash I suggest you can use this trick:
>>> print r"c:\test"'\\'
test\
It uses the implicit concatenation of string literals in Python and concatenates one string delimited with double quotes with another that is delimited by single quotes. Ugly, but works.
Another trick is to use chr(92) as it evaluates to "\".
I recently had to clean a string of backslashes and the following did the trick:
CleanString = DirtyString.replace(chr(92),'')
I realize that this does not take care of the "why" but the thread attracts many people looking for a solution to an immediate problem.
Since \" is allowed inside the raw string. Then it can't be used to identify the end of the string literal.
Why not stop parsing the string literal when you encounter the first "?
If that was the case, then \" wouldn't be allowed inside the string literal. But it is.
The reason for why r'\' is syntactical incorrect is that although the string expression is raw the used quotes (single or double) always have to be escape since they would mark the end of the quote otherwise. So if you want to express a single quote inside single quoted string, there is no other way than using \'. Same applies for double quotes.
But you could use:
'\\'
Another user who has since deleted their answer (not sure if they'd like to be credited) suggested that the Python language designers may be able to simplify the parser design by using the same parsing rules and expanding escaped characters to raw form as an afterthought (if the literal was marked as raw).
I thought it was an interesting idea and am including it as community wiki for posterity.
Naive raw strings
The naive idea of a raw string is
If I put an r in front of a pair of quotes,
I can put whatever I want between the quotes
and it will mean itself.
Unfortunately, this does not work, because if the whatever
happens to contain a quote, the raw string would end at that point.
It is simply impossible that I can put "whatever I want"
between fixed delimiters, because some of it could look like
the terminating delimiter -- no matter what that delimiter is.
Real-world raw strings (variant 1)
One possible approach to this problem would be to say
If I put an r in front of a pair of quotes,
I can put whatever I want between the quotes
as long as it does not contain a quote
and it will mean itself.
This restriction sounds harsh, until one recognizes that
Python's large offering of quotes can accommodate most situations
with this rule. The following are all valid Python quotes:
'
"
'''
"""
With this many possibilities for the delimiter, almost anything
can be made to work.
About the only exception would be if the string
literal is supposed to contain a complete list of all allowed
Python quotes.
Real-world raw strings (variant 2, as in Python)
Python, however, takes a different route using
an extended version of the above rule.
It effectively states
If I put an r in front of a pair of quotes,
I can put whatever I want between the quotes
as long as it does not contain a quote
and it will mean itself.
If I insist on including a quote, even that is allowed,
but I have to put a backslash before it.
So the Python approach is, in a sense, even more liberal
than variant 1 above -- but it has the side effect of
"mis"interpreting the closing quote as part of the string
if the last intended character of the string is a backslash.
Variant 2 is not helpful:
If I want the quote in my string,
but not the backslash, the allowed version of my string literal
will not be what I need.
However, given the three different other kinds of quotes I have
at my disposal, I will probably just pick one of those and my
problem will be solved -- so this is not problematic case.
The problematic case is this one:
If I want my string to end with a backslash, I am at a loss.
I need to resort to concatenating a non-raw string literal
containing the backslash.
Conclusion
After writing this, I go with several of the other posters
that variant 1 would have been easier to understand and to accept
and therefore more pythonic. That's life!
Comming from C it pretty clear to me that a single \ works as escape character allowing you to put special characters such as newlines, tabs and quotes into strings.
That does indeed disallow \ as last character since it will escape the " and make the parser choke. But as pointed out earlier \ is legal.
some tips :
1) if you need to manipulate backslash for path then standard python module os.path is your friend. for example :
os.path.normpath('c:/folder1/')
2) if you want to build strings with backslash in it BUT without backslash at the END of your string then raw string is your friend (use 'r' prefix before your literal string). for example :
r'\one \two \three'
3) if you need to prefix a string in a variable X with a backslash then you can do this :
X='dummy'
bs=r'\ ' # don't forget the space after backslash or you will get EOL error
X2=bs[0]+X # X2 now contains \dummy
4) if you need to create a string with a backslash at the end then combine tip 2 and 3 :
voice_name='upper'
lilypond_display=r'\DisplayLilyMusic \ ' # don't forget the space at the end
lilypond_statement=lilypond_display[:-1]+voice_name
now lilypond_statement contains "\DisplayLilyMusic \upper"
long live python ! :)
n3on
Despite its role, even a raw string cannot end in a single
backslash, because the backslash escapes the following quote
character—you still must escape the surrounding quote character to
embed it in the string. That is, r"...\" is not a valid string
literal—a raw string cannot end in an odd number of backslashes.
If you need to end a raw string with a single backslash, you can use
two and slice off the second.
Given the confusion around the arbitrary-seeming restriction against an odd number of backslashes at the end of a Python raw-string, it's fair to say that this is a design mistake or legacy issue originating in a desire to have a simpler parser.
While workarounds (such as r'C:\some\path' '\\' yielding 'C:\\some\\path\\' (in Python notation) or C:\some\path\ (verbatim)) are simple, it's counterintuitive to be needing them. For comparison, let's have a look at C++ and Perl.
In C++, we can straightforwardly use raw string literal syntax
#include <iostream>
int main() {
std::cout << R"(Hello World!)" << std::endl;
std::cout << R"(Hello World!\)" << std::endl;
std::cout << R"(Hello World!\\)" << std::endl;
std::cout << R"(Hello World!\\\)" << std::endl;
}
to get the following output:
Hello World!
Hello World!\
Hello World!\\
Hello World!\\\
If we want to use the closing delimiter (above: )) within the string literal, we can even extend the syntax in an ad-hoc way to R"delimiterString(quotedMaterial)delimiterString". For example, R"asdf(some random delimiters: ( } [ ] { ) < > just for fun)asdf" produces the string some random delimiters: ( } [ ] { ) < > just for fun in the output. (Ain't that a good use of "asdf"!)
In Perl, this code
my $str = q{This is a test.\\};
print ($str);
print ("This is another test.\n");
will output the following: This is a test.\This is another test.
Replacing the first line by
my $str = q{This is a test.\};
would lead to an error message: Can't find string terminator "}" anywhere before EOF at main.pl line 1.
However, Perl treating a pre-delimiter \ as an escape character doesn't prevent the user from having an odd number of backslashes at the end of the resulting string; eg to place 3 backslashes \\\ into the end of $str, simply end the code with 6 backslashes: my $str = q{This is a test.\\\\\\};. Importantly, while we need to double the backslashes in the input, there is no Python-like inconsistent-seeming syntactic restriction.
Another way of looking at things is that these 3 languages use different ways to address the parsing issue of interaction between escape characters and closing delimiters:
Python: disallows an odd number of backslashes just before the closing delimiter; a simple workaround is r'stringWithoutFinalBackslash' '\\'
C++: allows essentially¹ everything between the delimiters
Perl: allows essentially² everything between the delimiters, but backslashes need to be consistently doubled
¹ The custom delimiterString itself cannot be more than 16 characters long, but that's hardly a limitation.
² If you need the delimiter itself, just escape it with \.
However, to be fair in a comparison to Python, we need to acknowledge that (1) C++ didn't have such string literals until C++11 and is famously hard to parse and (2) Perl is even harder to parse.
I encountered this problem and found a partial solution which is good for some cases. Despite python not being able to end a string with a single backslash, it can be serialized and saved in a text file with a single backslash at the end. Therefore if what you need is saving a text with a single backslash on you computer, it is possible:
x = 'a string\\'
x
'a string\\'
# Now save it in a text file and it will appear with a single backslash:
with open("my_file.txt", 'w') as h:
h.write(x)
BTW it is not working with json if you dump it using python's json library.
Finally, I work with Spyder, and I noticed that if I open the variable in spider's text editor by double clicking on its name in the variable explorer, it is presented with a single backslash and can be copied to the clipboard that way (it's not very helpful for most needs but maybe for some..).
I need to change this string by escaping the windows path delimiters. I don't define the original string myself, so I can't pre-pend the raw string 'r'.
I need this:
s = 'C:\foo\bar'
to be this:
s = 'C:\\foo\\bar'
Everything I can find here and elsewhere says to do this:
s.replace( r'\\', r'\\\\' )
(Why I should have to escape the character inside a raw string I can't imagine)
But printing the string results in this. Obviously something has decided to re-interpret the escapes in the modified string:
C:♀oar
This would be so simple in Perl. How do I solve this in Python?
After a bunch of questions back and forth, the actual problem is this:
You have a file with contents like this:
C:\foo\bar
C:\spam\eggs
You want to read the contents of that file, and use it as pathnames, and you want to know how to escape things.
The answer is that you don't have to do anything at all.
Backslash sequences are processed in string literals, not in string objects that you read from a file, or from input (in 3.x; in 2.x that's raw_input), etc. So, you don't need to escape those backslash sequences.
If you think about it, you don't need to add quotes around a string to turn it into a string. And this is exactly the same case. The quotes and the escaping backslashes are both part of the string's representation, not the string itself.
In other words, if you save that example file as paths.txt, and you run the following code:
with open('paths.txt') as f:
file_paths = [line.strip() for line in f]
literal_paths = [r'C:\foo\bar', r'C:\spam\eggs']
print(file_paths == literal_paths)
… it will print out True.
Of course if your file was generated incorrectly and is full of garbage like this:
C:♀oar
Then there is no way to "escape the backslashes", because they're not there to escape. You can try to write heuristic code to reconstruct the original data that was supposed to be there, but that's the best you can do.
For example, you could do something like this:
backslash_map = { '\a': r'\a', '\b': r'\b', '\f': r'\f',
'\n': r'\n', '\r': r'\r', '\t': r'\t', '\v': r'\v' }
def reconstruct_broken_string(s):
for key, value in backslash_map.items():
s = s.replace(key, value)
return s
But this won't help if there were any hex, octal, or Unicode escape sequences to undo. For example, 'C:\foo\x02' and 'C:\foo\b' both represent the exact same string, so if you get that string, there's no way to know which one you're supposed to convert to. That's why the best you can do is a heuristic.
Don't do s.replace(anything). Just stick an r in front of the string literal, before the opening quote, so you have a raw string. Anything based on string replacement would be a horrible kludge, since s doesn't actually have backslashes in it; your code has backslashes in it, but those don't become backslashes in the actual string.
If the string actually has backslashes in it, and you want the string to have two backslashes wherever there once was one, you want this:
s = s.replace('\\', r'\\')
That'll replace any single backslash with two backslashes. If the string literally appears in the source code as s = 'C:\foo\bar', though, the only reasonable solution is to change that line. It's broken, and anything you do to the rest of the code won't make it not broken.
What is the best literal delimiter in Python and why? Single ' or double "? And most important, why?
I'm a beginner in Python and I'm trying to stick with just one. I know that in PHP, for example " is preferred, because PHP does not try to search for the 'string' variable. Is the same case in Python?
' because it's one keystroke less than ". Save your wrists!
They're otherwise identical (except you have to escape whichever you choose to use, if they appear inside the string).
Consider these strings:
"Don't do that."
'I said, "okay".'
"""She said, "That won't work"."""
Which quote is "best"?
Semantically there is no difference in Python; use either. Python also provides the handy triple string delimiter """ or ''' which can simplify multi-line quotes. There is also the raw string literal (r"..." or r'...') to inhibit \ escapes. The Language Reference has all the details.
For string constants containing a single quote use the double quote as delimiter.
The other way around, if you need a double quote inside.
Quick, shiftless typing leads to single quote delimiters.
>>> "it's very simple"
>>> 'reference to the "book"'
Single and double quotes act identically in Python. Escapes (\n) always work, and there is no variable interpolation. (If you don't want escapes, you can use the r flag, as in r"\n".)
Since I'm coming from a Perl background, I have a habit of using single quotes for plain strings and double-quotes for formats used with the % operator. But there is really no difference.
Other answers are about nested quoting. Another point of view I've come across, but I'm not sure I subscribe to, is to use single-quotes(') for characters (which are strings, but ord/chr are quick picky) and to use double-quotes for strings. Which disambiguates between a string that is supposed to be one character and one that just happens to be one character.
Personally I find most touch typists aren't affected noticably by the "load" of using the shift-key. YMMV on that part. Going down the "it's faster to not use the shift" is a slippery slope. It's also faster to use hyper-condensed variable/function/class/module names. Everyone just so loves the fast and short 8.3 DOS files names too. :) Pick what makes semantic sense to you, then optimize.
This is a rule I have heard about:
") If the string is for human consuption, that is interface text or output, use ""
') If the string is a specifier, like a dictionary key or an option, use ''
I think a well-enforced rule like that can make sense for a project, but it's nothing that I would personally care much about. I like the above, since I read it, but I always use "" (since I learned C first wayy back?).
I don't think there is a single best string delimiter. I like to use different delimiters to indicate different kinds of string. Specifically, I like to use "..." to delimit stings that are used for interpolation or that are natural language messages, and '...' to delimit small symbol-like strings. This gives me a subtle extra clue to the expected use for the string literal.
I try to always use raw strings (r"...") for regular expressions because (1) I don't have to escape backslash characters and (2) my editor recognises this convention and does syntax highlighting inside the regex.
The stylistic issues of single- vs. double-quotes are covered in question 56011.