Coding Style: Quotes
Skip Montanaro
skip at pobox.com
Thu Sep 12 13:59:32 EDT 2002
John> I'm curious if others have adopted any standards for choice of
John> single vs. double quotation marks to delimit strings. A look
John> through the standard library reveals the choice of one over the
John> other is rather arbitrary. I suspect it really makes no
John> difference, but the question has come up during a code review.
In situations where it doesn't matter (one or the other of the quotes
embedded in the string) I sort of half-heartedly pretend I'm programming in
C. Single-character strings are single-quoted while multi-character strings
are double-quoted. It really makes no sense to do it this way, and I'm not
very consistent about it. It's just a carryover from C. Your code
reviewers might appreciate the consistency if they have a C/C++/Java
background.
For multi-line strings I use triple quotes. (Again, the choice of style is
a bit arbitrary.) Generally I use """ because long chunks of English text
frequently contain contractions. For long strings which don't contain
newlines (like embedded SQL statements) I tend to enclose multiple "-quoted
literals in parens of some sort, like so:
rows = self.executesql("select cities.city, state, country"
" from cities, venues, events, addresses"
" where cities.city like %s"
" and events.active = 1"
" and venues.address = addresses.id"
" and addresses.city = cities.id"
" and events.venue = venues.id",
(city,))
--
Skip Montanaro
skip at pobox.com
consulting: http://manatee.mojam.com/~skip/resume.html
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