Practical Programming, 2nd Edition

A Single Statement That Spans Multiple Lines

Sometimes statements get pretty intricate. The recommended Python style is to limit lines to 80 characters, including spaces, tabs, and other whitespace characters, and that’s a common limit throughout the programming world. Here’s what to do when lines get too long or when you want to split it up for clarity.

In order to split up a statement into more than one line, you need to do one of two things:

1. Make sure your line break occurs inside parentheses, or
2. Use the line-continuation character, which is a backslash, \.

Note that the line-continuation character is a backslash (\), not the division symbol (/).

Here are examples of both:

>>> (2 +
... 3)
5
>>> 2 + ...