Using quotation marks inside quotation marks

Question

When I want to do a print command in Python and I need to use quotation marks, I don't know how to do it without closing the string.

For instance:

print " "a word that needs quotation marks" "

But when I try to do what I did above, I end up closing the string and I can't put the word I need between quotation marks.

How can I do that?

Answer 1

You could do this in one of three ways:

1. Use single and double quotes together:

   print('"A word that needs quotation marks"')
   "A word that needs quotation marks"
   

2. Escape the double quotes within the string:

   print("\"A word that needs quotation marks\"")
   "A word that needs quotation marks" 
   

3. Use triple-quoted strings:

   print(""" "A word that needs quotation marks" """)
   "A word that needs quotation marks" 
   

Answer 2

You need to escape it. (Using Python 3 print function):

>>> print("The boy said \"Hello!\" to the girl")
The boy said "Hello!" to the girl
>>> print('Her name\'s Jenny.')
Her name's Jenny.

See the python page for string literals.

Answer 3

Python accepts both " and ' as quote marks, so you could do this as:

>>> print '"A word that needs quotation marks"'
"A word that needs quotation marks"

Alternatively, just escape the inner "s

>>> print "\"A word that needs quotation marks\""
"A word that needs quotation marks"

Answer 4

Use the literal escape character \

print("Here is, \"a quote\"")

The character basically means ignore the semantic context of my next charcter, and deal with it in its literal sense.

Answer 5

When you have several words like this which you want to concatenate in a string, I recommend using format or f-strings which increase readability dramatically (in my opinion).

To give an example:

s = "a word that needs quotation marks"
s2 = "another word"

Now you can do

print('"{}" and "{}"'.format(s, s2))

which will print

"a word that needs quotation marks" and "another word"

As of Python 3.6 you can use:

print(f'"{s}" and "{s2}"')

yielding the same output.

Answer 6

One case which is prevalent in duplicates is the requirement to use quotes for external processes. A workaround for that is to not use a shell, which removes the requirement for one level of quoting.

os.system("""awk '/foo/ { print "bar" }' %""" % filename)

can usefully be replaced with

subprocess.call(['awk', '/foo/ { print "bar" }', filename])

(which also fixes the bug that shell metacharacters in filename would need to be escaped from the shell, which the original code failed to do; but without a shell, no need for that).

Of course, in the vast majority of cases, you don't want or need an external process at all.

with open(filename) as fh:
    for line in fh:
        if 'foo' in line:
            print("bar")

Answer 7

in Python 3.2.2 on Windows,

print(""""A word that needs quotation marks" """) 

is ok. I think it is the enhancement of Python interpretor.

Answer 8

You could also try string addition: print " "+'"'+'a word that needs quotation marks'+'"'

Answer 9

I'm surprised nobody has mentioned explicit conversion flag yet

>>> print('{!r}'.format('a word that needs quotation marks'))
'a word that needs quotation marks'

The flag !r is a shorthand of the repr() built-in function¹. It is used to print the object representation object.__repr__() instead of object.__str__().

There is an interesting side-effect though:

>>> print("{!r} \t {!r} \t {!r} \t {!r}".format("Buzz'", 'Buzz"', "Buzz", 'Buzz'))
"Buzz'"      'Buzz"'     'Buzz'      'Buzz'

Notice how different composition of quotation marks are handled differenty so that it fits a valid string representation of a Python object ².

---

^{1 Correct me if anybody knows otherwise.}

^{2 The question's original example " "word" " is not a valid representation in Python}

Answer 10

This worked for me in IDLE Python 3.8.2

print('''"A word with quotation marks"''')

Triple single quotes seem to allow you to include your double quotes as part of the string.

Answer 11

Enclose in single quotes like

print '"a word that needs quotation marks"'

Or Enclose in Double quotes

print "'a word that needs quotation marks'"

Or Use backslash \ to Escape

print " \"a word that needs quotation marks\" "

Answer 12

In case you don't want to use escape characters and actually want to print quote without saying " or \" and so on, you can tell python to print the ASCII value of the " character. The quote character in ASCII is 34, (single quote is 39)

In python 3

print(f'{chr(34)}')

Output: "