Question

I’m kinda’ new to python, but I have already written many programs including some like download-managers, games and text-editors which require a lot of string manipulation.
For representing a string literal I use either single or double inverted commas.. whichever comes to my mind first at that time.

Although I haven’t yet faced any trouble. My question: is there any purpose for which python allows both or is it just for compatibility, usability etc?

Answer 1

There is no difference between "string" and 'string' in Python, so, as you suggest, it’s just for usability.

>>> 'string' == "string"
True

You can also use triple quotes for multiline strings:

>>> mystring = """Hello
... World!"""
>>> mystring
'Hello\nWorld!'

Another trick is that adjacent string literals are automatically concatenated:

>>> mystring = "Hello" 'World!'
>>> mystring
'HelloWorld!'

There are also string prefixes which you can read about in the documentation.