Are line continuations needed?

[Duncan Booth]

Josiah Carlson <jcarlson at uci.edu> wrote in 
news:c55811$4be$1 at news.service.uci.edu:

> Graham Breed wrote:
> 
>>> I think that you might find there wasn't any indentation to lose. Read 
>>> the point more carefully and you might see he has a valid concern. 
>>> Consider this (none of the lines are indented):
>>>
>>> mystring = """\
>>> +---------------+
>>> |    '"         |
>>> +---------------+
>>> """
>>>
>>> Without a line continuation there simply isn't any way to write this 
>>> string and still have the box characters line up neatly.
>> 
>> 
>> mystring = """
>> +---------------+
>> |    '"         |
>> +---------------+
>> """[1:]
>> 
> 
> What about Windows?  You'd need to use [2:].

No, [1:] will work fine for windows. Windows stores files on disc with 
'\r\n' as line terminators, but Python (and most other programming 
languages) use '\n' internally as the line terminator.

> 
> I would also say that the trailing string slice is ugly.
> 
Agreed. Also it wouldn't work if you wanted the string as a docstring.