Having both single and double quotation in a Python string

Question

I'm trying to have a string that contains both single and double quotation in Python (' and "). However, Python always automatically corrects this to (\', "). I wonder if there's a way to put a double quotation and a single quotation together as it is.

Answer 1

Use triple quotes.

"""Trip'le qu"oted""" 

or

'''Ag'ain qu"oted''' 

Keep in mind that just because Python reprs a string with backslashes, doesn't mean it's actually added any slashes to the string, it may just be showing special characters escaped.

Using an example from the Python tutorial:

>>> len('"Isn\'t," she said.') 18 >>> len('''"Isn't," she said.''') 18 

Even though the second string appears one character shorter because it doesn't have a backslash in it, it's actually the same length -- the backslash is just to escape the single quote in the single quoted string.

Another example:

>>> for c in '''"Isn't," she said.''': ...     sys.stdout.write(c) ...  "Isn't," she said. >>>  

If you don't let Python format the string, you can see the string hasn't been changed, it was just Python trying to display it unambiguously.

See the tutorial section on strings.

Answer 2

Use triple-quoted strings:

""" This 'string' contains "both" types of quote """ ''' So ' does " this '''