multiline snippets with triple quotes

Fri Aug 13 09:22:38 EDT 2004

On Thu, 12 Aug 2004, gohaku wrote:

> Can dedent capture indents or tabs also...
> I noticed that if I do the following:
> snip = '''<html>blah blah
> 			</html>'''
> Tabs are included with snip.

dedent() will return that string as is, since the <html> tag is already in
the left-most position.  If you do something like this, however:

snip = '''\
		<html>blah blah
			</html>'''

dedent() will flush the <html> tag left, and the </html> tag will be 
indented by one tab (since it has a one-tab indent relative to <html>).

> Is there a heredocs (don't know why it's called that) equivalent in 
> Python?

AFAIK, triple quotes do everything heredocs do (but with a cleaner 
syntax!); the following produce identical output:

bash heredocs:

echo -n <<EOF
Some text.
  Woo!
The end.
EOF

Python triple quotes:

print '''\
Some text.
  Woo!
The end.'''