Creating a Multiline String

If you create a string using single or double quotes, the whole string must fit onto a single line.

Here’s what happens when you try to stretch a string across multiple lines:

​	​>>>​​ '​​one​
​	File "<stdin>", line 1
​	'one
​	^
​	SyntaxError: EOL while scanning string literal

As we saw in ​Creating Strings of Characters​, EOL stands for “end of line”. So in this error report, Python is saying that it reached the end of the line before it found the end of the string.

To span multiple lines, put three single quotes or three double quotes around the string instead of one. The string can then span as many lines as you want:

​	​>>>​​ ​​''​​'​​one​
​	​...​​ ​​two​
​	​...​​ ​​three​​''​​'​
​	'one\ntwo\nthree'

Notice that the string Python creates contains a \n sequence everywhere our input started a new line. Each newline is a character in the string.

Normalizing Line Endings

Each of the three major operating systems uses a different set of characters to indicate the end of a line. This set of characters is called a newline. On Linux and macOS, a newline is one \n character; on version 9 and earlier of Mac OS, it is one \r; and on Windows, the ends of lines are marked with both characters as \r\n.

Python always uses a single \n to indicate a newline, even on operating systems like Windows that do things other ways. This is called normalizing the string; Python does this so that you can write exactly the same program no matter what kind of machine you’re running on.