I am struggling with multi line comments in Python, I understood I can use # at the start of every line of multi line comments but there is also another way of using """ at the start and end of the comment; however, in my interpreter the """ method gives an output instead of ignoring the comment.
>>> """this should
be a multi
line comment"""
And my interpreter gives the following output:
'this should\nbe a multi\nline comment'
Can someone explain it?
Triple quoted strings are used as comments by many developers but it is actually not a comment. It is similar to regular strings in python but it allows the string to be multi-line. You will find no official reference for triple quoted strings to be a comment.
In python, there is only one type of comment that starts with hash # and can contain only a single line of text.
According to PEP 257, it can however be used as a docstring, which is again not really a comment.
def foo():
"""
Developer friendly text for describing the purpose of function
Some test cases used by different unit testing libraries
"""
<body of the function>
You can just assign them to a variable as you do with single quoted strings:
x = """a multi-line text
enclosed by
triple quotes
"""
Furthermore, if you try it in a repl, triple quoted strings get printed, had it really been a comment, should it have been printed?:
>>> #comment
>>> """triple quoted"""
'triple quoted'
5 into the interpreter, it will output 5. If you type "a", it will output """a""". However, if you type """this should be ignored"""; x=5;print(x), it will ignore the string and just print 5, because it's not assigned to anything, and there is a command in the rest of the line. This is just an idiosyncrasy of i/o in an interactive shell. The same way you can do quick math in the shell, 5+6 will output 11 for example
This is very easy to accomplish in python.
# This is a single-line comment
'''
This is a multi-line comment
'''
Just put the comments in ''' and put whatever you want inside of them!
