String Special Cases

Escape Sequences

Some characters cannot be typed directly inside a string literal. Python uses escape sequences — a backslash followed by a character — to represent them:

Sequence	Meaning
\\	Literal backslash
\'	Single quote
\"	Double quote
\n	Newline (line feed)
\t	Tab
\r	Carriage return
\0	Null character

Press Try it live to run these and watch the escapes take effect:

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>>> print("Line one\nLine two")
Line one
Line two
>>> print("Column 1\tColumn 2")
Column 1     Column 2
>>> print("She said, \"Hello.\"")
She said, "Hello."

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Raw Strings

If you need a string that contains many backslashes — such as a Windows file path — a raw string treats backslashes as literal characters. Prefix the opening quote with r:

Try editing the path below and see that the backslashes stay literal:

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>>> path = r"C:\Users\student\Documents"
>>> print(path)
C:\Users\student\Documents

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Without the r, \U, \s, and \D would be interpreted as escape sequences (and either produce unexpected characters or errors).

Multiline Strings

Triple-quoted strings can span multiple lines and preserve all whitespace, including newlines:

message = """Dear student,

Welcome to Introduction to Computer Science.

Regards,
The Department"""
print(message)

Output:

Dear student,

Welcome to Introduction to Computer Science.

Regards,
The Department

Triple-quoted strings are also used as docstrings — documentation attached to functions and classes. We will see those in the Functions chapter.

Testing for Substrings

The in operator tests whether one string is a substring of another:

Try changing the words below to test other substrings:

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>>> "cat" in "concatenate"
True
>>> "dog" in "concatenate"
False
>>> "not" not in "certainly"
True

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