CODEWITHSUNDEEP
pythonsyntaxstring-literalsquoting
Thi G.
Thi G.

Reputation: 1668

Using quotation marks inside quotation marks

When I want to do a print command in Python and I need to use quotation marks, I don't know how to do it without closing the string.

For instance:

print " "a word that needs quotation marks" "

But when I try to do what I did above, I end up closing the string and I can't put the word I need between quotation marks.

How can I do that?

Upvotes: 102

Views: 428305

Answers (12)

Jonathon Reinhart
Jonathon Reinhart

Reputation: 137517

You need to escape it.

>>> print("The boy said \"Hello!\" to the girl")
The boy said "Hello!" to the girl
>>> print('Her name\'s Jenny.')
Her name's Jenny.

See the python page for string literals.

Upvotes: 21

Idan Regev
Idan Regev

Reputation: 1

In case you don't want to use escape characters and actually want to print quote without saying " or \" and so on, you can tell python to print the ASCII value of the " character. The quote character in ASCII is 34, (single quote is 39)

In python 3

print(f'{chr(34)}')

Output: "

Upvotes: 0

Jamie Forrest
Jamie Forrest

Reputation: 11113

You could do this in one of three ways:

  1. Use single and double quotes together:

    print('"A word that needs quotation marks"')
"A word that needs quotation marks"

  2. Escape the double quotes within the string:

    print("\"A word that needs quotation marks\"")
"A word that needs quotation marks"

  3. Use triple-quoted strings:

    print(""" "A word that needs quotation marks" """)
"A word that needs quotation marks"

Upvotes: 234

Rodgers Kilonzo
Rodgers Kilonzo

Reputation: 71

Enclose in single quotes like

print '"a word that needs quotation marks"'

Or Enclose in Double quotes

print "'a word that needs quotation marks'"

Or Use backslash \ to Escape

print " \"a word that needs quotation marks\" "

Upvotes: 0

dalhax
dalhax

Reputation: 23

This worked for me in IDLE Python 3.8.2

print('''"A word with quotation marks"''')

Triple single quotes seem to allow you to include your double quotes as part of the string.

Upvotes: 1

Leonardus Chen
Leonardus Chen

Reputation: 1254

I'm surprised nobody has mentioned explicit conversion flag yet

>>> print('{!r}'.format('a word that needs quotation marks'))
'a word that needs quotation marks'

The flag !r is a shorthand of the repr() built-in function1. It is used to print the object representation object.__repr__() instead of object.__str__().

There is an interesting side-effect though:

>>> print("{!r} \t {!r} \t {!r} \t {!r}".format("Buzz'", 'Buzz"', "Buzz", 'Buzz'))
"Buzz'"      'Buzz"'     'Buzz'      'Buzz'

Notice how different composition of quotation marks are handled differenty so that it fits a valid string representation of a Python object 2.

1 Correct me if anybody knows otherwise.

2 The question's original example " "word" " is not a valid representation in Python

Upvotes: 2

Cleb
Cleb

Reputation: 26027

When you have several words like this which you want to concatenate in a string, I recommend using format or f-strings which increase readability dramatically (in my opinion).

To give an example:

s = "a word that needs quotation marks"
s2 = "another word"

Now you can do

print('"{}" and "{}"'.format(s, s2))

which will print

"a word that needs quotation marks" and "another word"

As of Python 3.6 you can use:

print(f'"{s}" and "{s2}"')

yielding the same output.

Upvotes: 2

tripleee
tripleee

Reputation: 189789

One case which is prevalent in duplicates is the requirement to use quotes for external processes. A workaround for that is to not use a shell, which removes the requirement for one level of quoting.

os.system("""awk '/foo/ { print "bar" }' %""" % filename)

can usefully be replaced with

subprocess.call(['awk', '/foo/ { print "bar" }', filename])

(which also fixes the bug that shell metacharacters in filename would need to be escaped from the shell, which the original code failed to do; but without a shell, no need for that).

Of course, in the vast majority of cases, you don't want or need an external process at all.

with open(filename) as fh:
    for line in fh:
        if 'foo' in line:
            print("bar")

Upvotes: 1

whackamadoodle3000
whackamadoodle3000

Reputation: 6748

You could also try string addition: print " "+'"'+'a word that needs quotation marks'+'"'

Upvotes: 0

AnthonyDouSole
AnthonyDouSole

Reputation: 9

in Python 3.2.2 on Windows,

print(""""A word that needs quotation marks" """)

is ok. I think it is the enhancement of Python interpretor.

Upvotes: 0

yurisich
yurisich

Reputation: 7119

Use the literal escape character \

print("Here is, \"a quote\"")

The character basically means ignore the semantic context of my next charcter, and deal with it in its literal sense.

Upvotes: 6

James Polley
James Polley

Reputation: 8181

Python accepts both " and ' as quote marks, so you could do this as:

>>> print '"A word that needs quotation marks"'
"A word that needs quotation marks"

Alternatively, just escape the inner "s

>>> print "\"A word that needs quotation marks\""
"A word that needs quotation marks"

Upvotes: 7

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