String literal with triple quotes in function definitions

Question

I am following the Python tutorial and at some point they talk about how the 1st statement of a function can be a String Literal. As far as the example goes, this String Literal seems to be done with three `"`s, giving in the example ``` """Print a Fibonacci series up to n.""" ``` According to this documentation, this would be used mainly to create some kind of automatically produced documentation. So I am wondering if someone here could explain to me what are these string literals exactly?

Accepted Answer

What you're talking about (I think) are called docstrings (Thanks Boud for the link).

```
def foo():
    """This function does absolutely nothing"""
```

Now, if you type `help(foo)` from the interpreter, you'll get to see the string that I put in the function. You can also access that string by `foo.__doc__`

Of course, string literals are just that -- literal strings.

```
a = "This is a string literal"  #the string on the right side is a string literal, "a" is a string variable.
```

or

```
foo("I'm passing this string literal to a function")
```

They can be defined in a bunch of ways:

```
'single quotes'
"double quotes"
""" triple-double quotes """  #This can contain line breaks!
```

or even

```
#This can contain line breaks too!  See?
''' triple-single 
    quotes '''
```

String literal with triple quotes in function definitions

Solution

Problem