In strings, a backslash \ character followed by one or more characters is used to represent any character that cannot be displayed in a string, such as:

• A character that does not appear on a standard keyboard;
• The single quote or double quote character that is being used to indicate the start and end of the string;
• The backslash character itself.

A sequence of characters that starts with a backslash is known as an escape sequence.

	A backslash that appears at the end of a line, and is not followed by any characters, indicates that this Python statement continues on the following line. For more information, see Multi-Line Statements.

The following table lists some of the most commonly used escape sequences in Python.

	For a complete list of the escape characters supported in Python, see the String Literals section of the Python reference manual.

If you want to create multi-line strings, and do not want to use the \n escape sequence, you can enclose your string in three single quote ''' or three double-quote """ characters:

multistr = """This string
is on two lines."""

In these strings, you do not need to include the backslash character \ before either the ' character or the " character.

	In the Python documentation, these multi-line strings are sometimes called triple-quoted strings.

If you want to create a string that contains backslashes, and you do not want Python to try to interpret these backslashes as escape sequences, you can create a raw string. To create a raw string, specify an r character before the opening single quote ' or double quote " character that encloses the string:

rawstr = r"This is a \raw \string \that \contains four backslashes"

You can also create raw multi-line strings:

rawmulti = r"""This is a \raw \string on two lines
\that \contains four backslashes"""