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