Initialize many string variables

Question

I'm initializing a lot of string variables as follows:

a, b, c, d, e, f, g, h = "", "", "", "", "", "", "", ""

You can see that this doesn't look very nice (morever the variables have longer names). Is there some more compact shortcut?

Answer 1

Definitely more compact:

a=b=c=d=e=f=g=h=""