Re: [Jython-users] triple quoted strings don't work in the interactive interpreter?

[Danny Y. <dy...@hk...>]

On Tue, 9 Jul 2002, Frank Cohen wrote:

> Tripple quoted strings evaluate to a single quote mark that is then
> taken literally as a quote. So if you try:
>
> print '''hi'''
>
> the interprepeter parses that to mean
>
> print 'hi'
>
> This works in both interactive and batch mode.
>
> The lexical error you see is when you are in the interpreter and type
> in '''. The interpreter thinks you have just asked it to evaluate
>
> '
>
> which is indeed an error.

But triple quoted strings are supposed to allow us to type across multiple
lines.  In CPython, we can create a string that spans multiple lines by
just typing it out between triple quotes:

###
Python 2.1.1 (#1, Sep 14 2001, 17:14:00)
[GCC 2.96 20000731 (Red Hat Linux 7.1 2.96-85)] on linux2
Type "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> '''hello
... world'''
'hello\nworld'
###


Jython's interactive lexer needs to wait until it sees the next triple
quote before trying to evaluate the whole thing, since the string can span
several lines.




I tried using a continuation character to get around this, but with the
same problems in interactive mode:

###
[dyoo@tesuque dyoo]$ jython
Jython 2.1 on java1.4.0 (JIT: null)
Type "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> 'hello\
Traceback (innermost last):
  (no code object) at line 0
  File "<console>", line 2
SyntaxError: Lexical error at line 2, column 0.  Encountered: <EOF> after
: ""
###


That is, continuation lines don't continue.  The interactive interpreter
doesn't give me the opportunity to continue typing out the next line, and
I think this is specifically an interactive issue.


Hope this helps!