Entry

Does Python distinguish between double and single quotes in any way?

Aug 2nd, 2000 03:56
unknown unknown, John Grayson, Aahz Maruch, Erik Max Francis

Single and double quotes may be freely interchanged (so long as
they are balanced %-) ). It is easy, therefore, to construct strings
containing either single or double quotes.

      "It's"       'quote "xxx"'

      lst = ['1', "2", '3']  is equivalent to lst = ["1", '2', "3"]

If you are constructing command strings to use in Unix, then it can
be very convenient. Note that you may still need to escape occasional
quotes...

   look4 = 'file'
   word_count = os.popen("grep 'open(%s \"rb\")' *.py | wc" % look4)

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In addition to all the other comments, remember that if you have quoting
problems, use """ or ''' (the two triple-quotes) -- you can avoid almost
all quote-quoting that way.

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They're both interchangeable.  They're used to help with quoting of the
quotes themselves, viz.:

    '"Buk," said the duck.'
    "There's a duck here."

Specifically, in Python the quotes are not used to determine whether
variables are embedded in strings, as they are in shell scripting or
Perl or some other languages; Python does not embed variables that way.