Lexical analysis

A Python program is read by a parser. Input to the parser is a stream of tokens, generated by the lexical analyzer. This chapter describes how the lexical analyzer breaks a file into tokens.

Python uses the 7-bit ASCII character set for program text.

New in version 2.3: An encoding declaration can be used to indicate that string literals and comments use an encoding different from ASCII. For compatibility with older versions, Python only warns if it finds 8-bit characters; those warnings should be corrected by either declaring an explicit encoding, or using escape sequences if those bytes are binary data, instead of characters.

The run-time character set depends on the I/O devices connected to the program but is generally a superset of ASCII.

Future compatibility note: It may be tempting to assume that the character set for 8-bit characters is ISO Latin-1 (an ASCII superset that covers most western languages that use the Latin alphabet), but it is possible that in the future Unicode text editors will become common. These generally use the UTF-8 encoding, which is also an ASCII superset, but with very different use for the characters with ordinals 128-255. While there is no consensus on this subject yet, it is unwise to assume either Latin-1 or UTF-8, even though the current implementation appears to favor Latin-1. This applies both to the source character set and the run-time character set.

Line structure #

A Python program is divided into a number of logical lines.

Logical lines #

The end of a logical line is represented by the token NEWLINE. Statements cannot cross logical line boundaries except where NEWLINE is allowed by the syntax (e.g., between statements in compound statements). A logical line is constructed from one or more physical lines by following the explicit or implicit line joining rules.

Physical lines #

A physical line is a sequence of characters terminated by an end-of-line sequence. In source files, any of the standard platform line termination sequences can be used — the Unix form using ASCII LF (linefeed), the Windows form using the ASCII sequence CR LF (return followed by linefeed), or the Macintosh form using the ASCII CR (return) character. All of these forms can be used equally, regardless of platform.

When embedding Python, source code strings should be passed to Python APIs using the standard C conventions for newline characters (the \n character, representing ASCII LF, is the line terminator).

Comments #

A comment starts with a hash character (#) that is not part of a string literal, and ends at the end of the physical line. A comment signifies the end of the logical line unless the implicit line joining rules are invoked. Comments are ignored by the syntax; they are not tokens.

Encoding declarations #

If a comment in the first or second line of the Python script matches the regular expression coding[=:]\s*([-\w.]+), this comment is processed as an encoding declaration; the first group of this expression names the encoding of the source code file. The recommended forms of this expression are

# -*- coding: <encoding-name> -*-

which is recognized also by GNU Emacs, and

# vim:fileencoding=<encoding-name>

which is recognized by VIM. In addition, if the first bytes of the file are the UTF-8 byte-order mark ('\xef\xbb\xbf'), the decl