here is the code:

print('Hello World\nIt\'s hot today')

okay I get the first slash is an escape sequence but whats the second slash for ?

CodePudding user response：

print('Hello World\nIt\'s hot today')

The 2nd slash here, which appears before a ' character, allows you to use this character in a string which is scoped with it (otherwise, the Python interpreter has to conclude that this character is where the string ends).

Alternatively, you could scope this string with " instead of ', which would make that 2nd slash redundant:

print("Hello World\nIt's hot today")

CodePudding user response：

The second \ is to escape '. Without this, python would see

'Hello World\nIt's hot today'

Now, it would interpret 'Hello world\nIt' as a string, because you ended it with '! Then it does not know what to do with the rest of your code s hot today', resulting in an syntax error.

To avoid escaping ', you could instead use ":

print("Hello World\nIt's hot today")

The same goes for escaping ". If you want to print a string He said "Hello, world!", then you would want either one of the following:

print("He said \"Hello, world!\"")
print('He said "Hello, world!"')

CodePudding user response：

If you try to remove the second , you would get :

print('Hello World\nIt's hot today')

You notice the syntaxic coloration is a little bit off, only half the sentence is recognised as a string. It's because you close the string with the quote in the middle. The solution the be able to still write a quote in a string, is to use a \ before, to remove all properties of the upcoming character. With that, the following quote is just a normal character and no longer end the string.

print('Hello World\nIt\'s hot today')

Another solution is to use double quotes when you want to write simple quotes inside the string.

print("Hello World\nIt's hot today")