Question

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

Answer 1

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