I have left the program intact below* because I am afraid that if I cut it I
may cut out something that is essential. I am working from an existing
program that I have typed out under instructions, but am now trying to
replace the commented out section with just one command. The program with
the commented out section worked fine.
I have been stuck for some hourslast night andagain this morning. I have
inserted the print command after the commented out section in order simply to
try out whether the triple quotation marks ever work as I thought they did,
and the answer is yes they do.
If I leave the target.write without the final """, I get the error (which I
would indeed expect):
lisi@Tux:~/Python/LearnPythonTheHardWay$ python extra-credit_16a.py
learning.txt
File "extra-credit_16a.py", line 42
^
SyntaxError: EOF while scanning triple-quoted string
lisi@Tux:~/Python/LearnPythonTheHardWay
Fair enough. the closing quotation marks are not there.
But when they _are_ there, i.e. when that stanza reads:
target.write """
line1\nline2\nline3\n
"""
I get:
lisi@Tux:~/Python/LearnPythonTheHardWay$ python extra-credit_16a.py
learning.txt
File "extra-credit_16a.py", line 38
"""
^
SyntaxError: invalid syntax
So where should I be putting those wretched triple quotes? I have been stuck
on this for hours.
With the target.write stanza there, none of the rest of the program works
either. If I comment out the target.write stanza and leave the print stanza
above it alone, the whole program runs as I would expect it to.
I have searched the Python.org site; I have googled; I am stuck and have run
out of ideas.
Lisi
*Herewith the program:
from sys import argv
script, filename=argv
print "We're going to erase %r." % filename
print "If you don't want that, hit CTRL-C (^C)."
print "If you do want that, hit RETURN."
raw_input("?")
print "Opening the file..."
target=open(filename, 'w')
print "Truncating the file. Goodbye!"
target.truncate()
print "Now I'm going to ask you for three lines."
line1=raw_input("line1: ")
line2=raw_input("line2: ")
line3=raw_input("line3: ")
print "I'm going to write these to the file."
# target.write(line1)
# target.write("\n")
# target.write(line2)
# target.write("\n")
# target.write(line3)
# target.write("\n")
print """
line1\nline2\nline3\n
"""
target.write """
line1\nline2\nline3\n
print "And finally we close it."
target.close()
_______________________________________________
Tutor maillist - Tutor@python.org
To unsubscribe or change subscription options:
http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/tutor
