[Tutor] Newline question

[Alexander Q.]

On Fri, Aug 3, 2012 at 1:40 PM, Jerry Hill <malaclypse2 at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Fri, Aug 3, 2012 at 4:18 PM, Alexander Q. <redacted@example.com> wrote:
> > I'm following the tutorial from python.org
> > (http://docs.python.org/tutorial/introduction.html) and am having a few
> > indiscrepancies regarding the new line command.
> >
> > The tutorial says that this code
> >
> > hello = "This is a rather long string containing\n\
> > several lines of text just as you would do in C.\n\
> >         Note that whitespace at the beginning of the line is\
> >  significant."
> >
> > should yield this output:
> >
> > This is a rather long string containing
> > several lines of text just as you would do in C.
> >     Note that whitespace at the beginning of the line is significant.
>
> You left out the other line of code in the tutorial, which says you
> need to do print(hello) to the the output that is described. Did you
> do that?  If so, it should work fine.  If not, what did you do
> instead?  If you just typed:
>
> >>>hello
>
> at the interpreter prompt, then you are actually seeing the equivalent
> of print(repr(hello)), instead of print(hello).
>
> Can you copy and paste your session for us?
>
> Jerry
>

That was it Jerry- when I typed in "print hello" instead of just "hello",
the output was exactly like the one in the tutorial. Alternatively, I could
accomplish the same type of output by using triple quotes around the same
text, except that I would have to format it manually if I want it to come
out looking the same way as it did when using "\n" in the previous example?
Thanks again for your help. The way I understand it from your explanation
is that "hello" does a literal output of everything typed without
processing the escape backslashes, while "print hello" does process them.

-Alex
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/tutor/attachments/20120803/dff5894a/attachment-0001.html>