What is the difference b/w single quotes and double quotes? Why do I see them used interchangeably in numerous examples? When should single quotes be used and when double quotes?

Question

anonymous · Answer

they accomplish the same function. it just depends on what youre trying to print. if youre trying to print something like. "He went to the store," said the boy. you would type
print '"He went to the store", said the boy.'
whenever you type the first quote it will look for the next instance of that particular character to terminate the string. so you can put double quotes inside single quote or single quotes inside double quotes. you can additionally use all the same kind of quotes and just put a "\" infront of the quotes you want to appear in the string. so the earlier example would be
print "\"He went to the store,\" said the boy."

carlsmith · Answer

Nothing really. In Python, you can use either, but you must end the string with the same type of quotes as you start it with. It's useful because you'll often have quotes in strings. If you did

name = 'O'Reilly'

you'd get an error because the string 'O' is followed by some gibberish code, Reilly'. If you do

name = "O'Reilly"

everything is fine. You can use single quotes when you've got double quotes in a string.

quote = 'He replies, "We're an autonomous workers collective".'

If you want your string to span multiple lines, or if it contains both single and double quotes, you can use 'triple quotes', three single or three double quotes to open and three more of the same to close.

both = ''' O'Reilly says "Hello" '''
long = '''
One line of text
another one
'''

carlsmith · Answer

Note: In triple quoted strings, newlines are preserved, even if they're blank lines.

>>>print long

One line of text
another one

>>>

You've also got the escape characters. A backslashed character which has a special meaning. There's a few, but these are the common ones.

= newline
	 = tab
\' = treat this single quote as a regular part of the string
\" = same as above, but for a double quote
\ = same again, but for a backslash