What is the function of the second slash in a python print function. I know the first is an escape sequence but i dont understand why they have 2

Question

here is the code:

print('Hello World\nIt\'s hot today')

okay I get the first slash is an escape sequence but whats the second slash for?

Answer 1

print('Hello World\nIt\'s hot today')

The 2nd slash here, which appears before a ' character, allows you to use this character in a string which is scoped with it (otherwise, the Python interpreter has to conclude that this character is where the string ends).

Alternatively, you could scope this string with " instead of ' , which would make that 2nd slash redundant:

print("Hello World\nIt's hot today")

Answer 2

The second \ is to escape ' . Without this, python would see

'Hello World\nIt's hot today'

Now, it would interpret 'Hello world\nIt' as a string, because you ended it with ' ! Then it does not know what to do with the rest of your code s hot today' , resulting in an syntax error.

To avoid escaping ' , you could instead use " :

print("Hello World\nIt's hot today")

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The same goes for escaping " . If you want to print a string He said "Hello, world!" , then you would want either one of the following:

print("He said \"Hello, world!\"")
print('He said "Hello, world!"')