Return statement on multiple lines

Question

Have scoured the interwebs trying to figure this out but with no luck. As far as I know you usually only have one return statement however my problem is that I need to have line breaks in my return statement in order for the testing to return 'true'. What I've tried is throwing up errors, probably just a rookie mistake. My current function with no attempts to make a line break is below.

def game(word, con):
   return (word + str('!')
   word + str(',') + word + str(phrase1)

Are new line breaks (\n) supposed to work in return statements? It's not in my testing.

Answer 1

In python, an open paren causes subsequent lines to be considered a part of the same line until a close paren.

So you can do:

def game(word, con):
    return (word + str('!') +
            word + str(',') +
            word + str(phrase1))

But I wouldn't recommend that in this particular case. I mention it since it's syntactically valid and you might use it elsewhere.

Another thing you can do is use the backslash:

def game(word, con):
    return word + '!' + \
           word + ',' + \
           word + str(phrase)
    # Removed the redundant str('!'), since '!' is a string literal we don't need to convert it

Or, in this particular case, my advice would be to use a formatted string.

def game(word, con):
    return "{word}!{word},{word}{phrase1}".format(
        word=word, phrase1=phrase1")

That looks like it's functionally equivalent to what you're doing in yours but I can't really know. The latter is what I'd do in this case though.

If you want a line break in the STRING, then you can use "\n" as a string literal wherever you need it.

def break_line():
    return "line\nbreak"

Answer 2

You can split up a line in a return statement, but you have forgotten a parenthesis at the end and that you also need to separate it with another operator (in this case, a +)

Change:

def game(word, con):
   return (word + str('!')
   word + str(',') + word + str(phrase1)

To:

def game(word, con):
   return (word + str('!') + # <--- plus sign
   word + str(',') + word + str(phrase1))
#                                       ^ Note the extra parenthesis

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Note that calling str() on '!' and ',' is pointless. They are already strings.