CODEWITHSUNDEEP
python
Alex
Alex

Reputation: 636

What does ' ' (tow single quotations marks, one after the other, not the double that come together) do?

I'm printing this in Python (3.6)

print(' 'f' ')

and it shows nothing! What is happening?

It sounds like whatever I put inside the inner ' ', vanish.

Upvotes: 0

Views: 49

Answers (2)

user2357112
user2357112

Reputation: 280310

' ' is a string literal representing a single space. This is something pretty much any Python programmer needs to be thoroughly familiar with.

f' ' is an f-string. If there were any braces in there, it would do string interpolation, but there are no braces. Like ' ', it ends up evaluating to a string representing a single space.

When two string literals appear side by side, Python implicitly concatenates them, as if you had used +, but with super-high precedence. This is an obscure feature that causes more bugs than it's worth.

Putting all that together, ' 'f' ' evaluates to a string containing two spaces, so you don't see anything when you print it, because you can't see spaces.

Upvotes: 4

rdas
rdas

Reputation: 21275

You are actually defining two strings there.

  1. ' ' - this is a normal space
  2. f' ' - this is an f-string or format string. Any string that's prefixed with f is an f-string. This one also happens to be just a space.

So you have two spaces. Side-by-side. Python implicitly concatenates the two strings to give you the result. So the result of print is also just 2 spaces.

If you wanted to print "f", you can do:

print(' \'f\' ')

You need to escape the single quotes.

Upvotes: 1

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