The text in the following image Moment of zen: Practicality beats purity – Beautiful text strings, Rendered in literal form. Simple elegance:
Figure 2.1: Moment of zen: Practicality beats purity Moment of zen
At first sight support for both quoting styles seems to violate an important principle of Pythonic style. From the Zen of Python:
There should be one – and preferably only one – obvious way to do it.
In this case, however, another aphorism from the same source takes precedence:
Practicality beats purity
The utility of supporting two quoting styles is valued more highly than the alternative:a single quoting style combined with more frequent use of ugly escape sequences, which we'll encounter shortly.
Adjacent literal strings are concatenated by the Python compiler into a single string:
>>> "first" "second" 'firstsecond'
Although at first this seems rather pointless, it can be useful for nicely formatting code as we'll see later.