Pythonic way to create a long multi-line string

Question

I have a very long query. I would like to split it in several lines in Python. A way to do it in JavaScript would be using several sentences and joining them with a +<

Answer 1

Others have mentioned the parentheses method already, but I'd like to add that with parentheses, inline comments are allowed.

Comment on each fragment:

nursery_rhyme = (
    'Mary had a little lamb,'          # Comments are great!
    'its fleece was white as snow.'
    'And everywhere that Mary went,'
    'her sheep would surely go.'       # What a pesky sheep.
)

Comment not allowed after continuation:

When using backslash line continuations (\ ), comments are not allowed. You'll receive a SyntaxError: unexpected character after line continuation character error.

nursery_rhyme = 'Mary had a little lamb,' \  # These comments
    'its fleece was white as snow.'       \  # are invalid!
    'And everywhere that Mary went,'      \
    'her sheep would surely go.'
# => SyntaxError: unexpected character after line continuation character

Better comments for Regex strings:

Based on the example from https://docs.python.org/3/library/re.html#re.VERBOSE,

a = re.compile(
    r'\d+'  # the integral part
    r'\.'   # the decimal point
    r'\d*'  # some fractional digits
)

# Using VERBOSE flag, IDE usually can't syntax highight the string comment.
a = re.compile(r"""\d +  # the integral part
                   \.    # the decimal point
                   \d *  # some fractional digits""", re.X)