What's the difference on docstrings with triple SINGLE quotes and triple DOUBLE quotes?

prashu picture prashu · Oct 26, 2012 · Viewed 10.4k times · Source

I was just wondering what is the difference between two ways of writing Python Docstrings (__doc__):

  1. three single quotes:

    '''
    Comment goes here
    '''  
    
  2. three double quotes:

    """
    Comment goes here
    """
    

Is there any subtle difference in the way doc string could be formatted later while generating docs?

Answer

BrenBarn picture BrenBarn · Oct 26, 2012

No. They are the same. The only difference is that the first one can contain a sequence of three unescaped double quotes, while the second can contain a sequence of three unescaped single quotes. (In other words, because the delimiters are different, there is a slight difference in what characters you can use inside them.)

Docstrings are just regular strings, and in Python there is no difference between the different string delimiters, except that, of course, you can't use the string delimiter inside the string.