56 – Ergonomic multiline strings

When I’m writing multiline strings I like to have the """ by themselves, for readability. However, this creates an extra empty line at the beginning and end of the string:

string = """
Multiline string.
No escaped newlines
"""

print("> " + string + "!")

> 
Multiline string.
No escaped newlines
!

This is not what I want… To fix this, I can use the backslash character \ to escape those extra newlines:

string = """\
Multiline string.
First & last newlines escaped\
"""

print("> " + string + "!")

> Multiline string.
First & last newlines escaped!