Does Python have an equivalent of Perl's qq?

Question

Using qq , Perl allows almost any character to be used as quotation marks to define strings containing ' and " without needing to escape them:

qq(She said, "Don't!")
qq¬And he said, "I won't."¬

(especially handy since my keyboard has ¬ which is almost never used).

Does Python have an equivalent?

Answer 1

You could use triple single quotes or triple double quotes.

>>> s = '''She said, "Don't!"'''
>>> print(s)
She said, "Don't!"
>>> s = """'She sai"d, "Don't!'"""
>>> print(s)
'She sai"d, "Don't!'

Answer 2

You can't define arbitrary characters as quotes, but if you need to use both ' and " within a string you can do so with a multiline string:

>>> """She said "that's ridiculous" and I agreed."""
'She said "that\'s ridiculous" and I agreed.'

Note, however, that Python will get confused if the quote type you use is also the last character in the string:

>>> """He yelled "Whatever's the matter?""""
SyntaxError: EOL while scanning string literal

so you'd have to switch in that case:

>>> '''He yelled "Whatever's the matter?"'''
'He yelled "Whatever\'s the matter?"'

---

Purely as an alternative, you could split the string up into parts that do and don't have each quote type and rely on Python implicitly joining consecutive strings:

>>> "This hasn't got double quotes " 'but "this has"'
'This hasn\'t got double quotes but "this has"'
>>> "This isn't " 'a """very""" "attractive" approach'
'This isn\'t a """very""" "attractive" approach'

Answer 3

I just asked myself where is quote() method in python? Particularly Perl's qXXX sugar. Found one quote() in urllib but this is not what I wanted - that is to simply quote string in the string itself. And then it hit me:

some_string = repr(some_string)

repr built-in will always quote string properly. It will get single quoted though. Perl had a tendency to double-quote.