How the '\n' symbol works in python

Question

I always thought that in order to get a new line in my standard output I need to add '\\n' inside my print statement. But recently I came across the following expression:

print("Hello"),'\n',print("World")

Which works just like:

print("Hello\nWorld")

Can someone explain how the '\\n' works outside the print function and yet my standard output knows to get a new line? Also what is the meaning of the comma symbols in the first expression which are also outside the print function?

Answer 1

print('Hello'),'\n',print('World')

and

print('Hello\nWorld')

are not equivalent.

The first is an expression which returns a tuple of (NoneType, str, NoneType) (because \\n is a string and the print function returns None , which has type NoneType ). However, this expression has the side effect of also printing first Hello then World to stdout. Since print, by default, puts a newline at the end of each invocation, this will appear as

Hello
World

in stdout.

The second is simply an expression that prints Hello\\nWorld to stdout, which (since \\n is the newline character) also appears as

Hello
World

in stdout.

At a REPL (or jupyter notebook, or similar), you will get:

>>> print('Hello'),'\n',print('World')
Hello
World
(None, '\n', None)
>>> print('Hello\nWorld')
Hello
World

this is because default behaviour is for the REPL to print the value that your expression evaluates to, unless that value is None . So in the first case it executes the two print functions (getting Hello\\nWorld on stdout) then prints the expression's value, the tuple (None, '\\n', None) .

Answer 2

on my jupyter-notebook I get:

Hello
World
(None, '\n', None)

so print("Hello"),'\\n',print("World") it is not the same as print("Hello\\nWorld")