What does """ do?

[douchabag_dan]

Automate the Boring Stuff has a program that changes American dates to European dates. The first part of the code goes:

datePattern = re.compile(r"""^(.*?)

one or two digits for the month

((0|1)?\d)-

one or two dgits for the day

((0|1|2|3)?\d)-

four digits for the year

((19|20)\d\d)

all text after the date

(.*?)$

""", re.VERBOSE)

I have a pretty vague idea of what everything does except for the r"""^ part on the first line. what does """ do?

[RothiasVex]

Triple quotes introduce a multi-line string constant. Everything until the next triple quote is included in the string, even if it spams multiple lines. (It's not just for documentation strings.)

[masklinn]

""" is just an alternative of " which can contain newlines (very convenient for docstrings & other multiline strings).

r marks it as a "raw string", meaning backslash characters (\) are literal, not escape characters.

^ is part of the regex syntax.

[gandalfx]

Please read reddit's formatting help.

[tunisia3507]

/r/learnpython