Trying to understand strings and lists of strings

[deanhystad]

It prints single quotes because that is what str.__repr__() uses to mark the start and end of the string.

def print_string(string):
    print(string, repr(string))

print_string("apple")
print_string('apple')
print_string("""apple""")

Output:
apple 'apple'
apple 'apple'
apple 'apple'

When you print a string, Python calls str.__str__() to get a pretty representation of the str object. The pretty representation has no surrounding quotes. When you print a list of strings, Python calls str.__repr__() to get a more informative representation of the string. The informative representation is enclosed in single quotes to tell the user 'This is a str object'.

The quote characters at the start and end of a string literal are not part of the string. They are there to tell Python where the string starts and ends. When Python converts the string literal to a str object, the new str object doesn't have any quotes.