Python: Essential Reference, Third Edition

Strings

To create string literals, enclose them in single, double, or triple quotes as follows:

a = "Hello World"
b = 'Python is groovy'
c = """What is footnote 5?"""

The same type of quote used to start a string must be used to terminate it. Triple-quoted strings capture all the text that appears prior to the terminating triple quote, as opposed to single- and double-quoted strings, which must be specified on one logical line. Triple-quoted strings are useful when the contents of a string literal span multiple lines of text such as the following:

print '''Content-type: text/html

<h1> Hello World </h1>
Click <a href="http://www.python.org">here</a>.
'''

Strings are sequences of characters indexed by integers, starting at zero. To extract a ...