Single quotes vs double quotes in Python

Question

According to the documentation  they re pretty much interchangeable   Is there a stylistic reason to use one over the other

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Your team s taste or your project s coding guidelines   If you are in a multilanguage environment  you might wish to encourage the use of the same type of quotes for strings that the other language uses  for instance  Else  I personally like best the look of

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I just use whatever strikes my fancy at the time  it s convenient to be able to switch between the two at a whim   Of course  when quoting quote characetrs  switching between the two might not be so whimsical after all

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In Perl you want to use single quotes when you have a string which doesn t need to interpolate variables or escaped characters like  n   t   r  etc    PHP makes the same distinction as Perl  content in single quotes will not be interpreted  not even  n will be converted   as opposed to double quotes which can contain variables to have their value printed out   Python does not  I m afraid  Technically seen  there is no   token  or the like  to separate a name text from a variable in Python  Both features make Python more readable  less confusing  after all  Single and double quotes can be used interchangeably in Python

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If you re going to use apostrophes             you ll definitely want to use double quotes          For that simple reason  I always use double quotes on the outside  Always  Speaking of fluff  what good is streamlining your string literals with   if you re going to have to use escape characters to represent apostrophes  Does it offend coders to read novels  I can t imagine how painful high school English class was for you

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I use double quotes because I have been doing so for years in most languages  C    Java  VB     except Bash  because I also use double quotes in normal text and because I m using a  modified  non-English keyboard where both characters require the shift key

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I m with Will     Double quotes for text Single quotes for anything that behaves like an identifier Double quoted raw string literals for regexps Tripled double quotes for docstrings   I ll stick with that even if it means a lot of escaping    I get the most value out of single quoted identifiers standing out because of the quotes  The rest of the practices are there just to give those single quoted identifiers some standing room

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example      f   open  c  word txt    r   f   open  c  word txt    r   f   open  c  word txt    r   f   open  c    word txt    r     Results are the same      no  they re not the same  A single backslash will escape characters  You just happen to luck out in that example because  k and  w aren t valid escapes like  t or  n or    or     If you want to use single backslashes  and have them interpreted as such   then you need to use a  raw  string  You can do this by putting an  r  in front of the string  im raw   r c  temp txt  non raw    c   temp txt  another way    c  temp txt    As far as paths in Windows are concerned  forward slashes are interpreted the same way  Clearly the string itself is different though  I wouldn t guarantee that they re handled this way on an external device though

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I aim to minimize both pixels and surprise  I typically prefer   in order to minimize pixels  but   instead if the string has an apostrophe  again to minimize pixels  For a docstring  however  I prefer     over     because the latter is non-standard  uncommon  and therefore surprising  If now I have a bunch of strings where I used   per the above logic  but also one that can get away with a    I may still use   in it to preserve consistency  only to minimize surprise   Perhaps it helps to think of the pixel minimization philosophy in the following way  Would you rather that English characters looked like A B C or AA BB CC  The latter choice wastes 50  of the non-empty pixels

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Quoting the official docs at https   docs python org 2 0 ref strings html      In plain English  String literals can be enclosed in matching single quotes     or double quotes        So there is no difference  Instead  people will tell you to choose whichever style that matches the context  and to be consistent  And I would agree - adding that it is pointless to try to come up with  conventions  for this sort of thing because you ll only end up confusing any newcomers

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I chose to use double quotes because they are easier to see

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Personally I stick with one or the other  It doesn t matter  And providing your own meaning to either quote is just to confuse other people when you collaborate

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Python uses quotes something like this   mystringliteral1  this is a string with  quotes   mystringliteral2  this is a string with  quotes   mystringliteral3    this is a string with  quotes  and more  quotes     mystringliteral4    this is a string with  quotes  and more  quotes     mystringliteral5  this is a string with   quotes    mystringliteral6  this is a string with  042quotes 042  mystringliteral6  this is a string with  047quotes 047   print mystringliteral1 print mystringliteral2 print mystringliteral3 print mystringliteral4 print mystringliteral5 print mystringliteral6   Which gives the following output   this is a string with  quotes  this is a string with  quotes  this is a string with  quotes  and more  quotes  this is a string with  quotes  and more  quotes  this is a string with  quotes  this is a string with  quotes

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If the string you have contains one  then you should use the other   For example   You re able to do this   or  He said  Hi      Other than that  you should simply be as consistent as you can  within a module  within a package  within a project  within an organisation    If your code is going to be read by people who work with C C    or if you switch between those languages and Python   then using    for single-character strings  and    for longer strings might help ease the transition    Likewise for following other languages where they are not interchangeable    The Python code I ve seen in the wild tends to favour   over    but only slightly   The one exception is that    these    are much more common than    these     from what I have seen

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None as far as I know  Although if you look at some code      is commonly used for strings of text  I guess   is more common inside text than     and     appears in hashkeys and things like that

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I used to prefer    especially for    docstrings     as I find    this creates some fluff     Also    can be typed without the Shift key on my Swiss German keyboard   I have since changed to using triple quotes for    docstrings     to conform to PEP 257

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I use double quotes in general  but not for any specific reason - Probably just out of habit from Java   I guess you re also more likely to want apostrophes in an inline literal string than you are to want double quotes

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Triple quoted comments are an interesting subtopic of this question  PEP 257 specifies triple quotes for doc strings  I did a quick check using Google Code Search and found that triple double quotes in Python are about 10x as popular as triple single quotes -- 1 3M vs 131K occurrences in the code Google indexes  So in the multi line case your code is probably going to be more familiar to people if it uses triple double quotes

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It s probably a stylistic preference more than anything   I just checked PEP 8 and didn t see any mention of single versus double quotes   I prefer single quotes because its only one keystroke instead of two   That is  I don t have to mash the shift key to make single quote

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I like to use double quotes around strings that are used for interpolation or that are natural language messages  and single quotes for small symbol-like strings  but will break the rules if the strings contain quotes  or if I forget  I use triple double quotes for docstrings and raw string literals for regular expressions even if they aren t needed   For example   LIGHT MESSAGES          English    There are   number of lights s lights         Pirate     Arr  Thar be   number of lights s lights      def lights message language  number of lights          Return a language-appropriate string reporting the light count         return LIGHT MESSAGES language    locals    def is pirate message          Return True if the given message sounds piratical         return re search r   i  arr avast yohoho     message  is not None

[python] Single quotes vs. double quotes in Python

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