String literal with triple quotes in function definitions
I am following the Python tutorial and at some point they talk about how the 1st statement of a function can be a String Literal. As far as the example goes, this String Literal seems to be done with three "s, giving in the example
"""Print a Fibonacci series up to n."""
According to this documentation, this would be used mainly to create some kind of automatically produced documentation.
So I am wondering if someone here could explain to me what are these string literals exactly?
Answer
What you're talking about (I think) are called docstrings (Thanks Boud for the link).
def foo():
"""This function does absolutely nothing"""
Now, if you type help(foo) from the interpreter, you'll get to see the string that I put in the function. You can also access that string by foo.__doc__
Of course, string literals are just that -- literal strings.
a = "This is a string literal" #the string on the right side is a string literal, "a" is a string variable.
or
foo("I'm passing this string literal to a function")
They can be defined in a bunch of ways:
'single quotes'
"double quotes"
""" triple-double quotes """ #This can contain line breaks!
or even
#This can contain line breaks too! See?
''' triple-single
quotes '''