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.