I have the above-mentioned error in s1="some very long string............"

Does anyone know what I am doing wrong?

You are not putting a " before the end of the line.

Use """ if you want to do this:

""" a very long string ...... 
....that can span multiple lines
"""

I had this problem – I eventually worked out that the reason was that I’d included \ characters in the string. If you have any of these, “escape” them with \\ and it should work fine.

(Assuming you don’t have/want line breaks in your string…)

How long is this string really?

I suspect there is a limit to how long a line read from a file or from the commandline can be, and because the end of the line gets choped off the parser sees something like s1="some very long string.......... (without an ending ") and thus throws a parsing error?

You can split long lines up in multiple lines by escaping linebreaks in your source like this:

s1="some very long string.....\
...\
...."

In my situation, I had \r\n in my single-quoted dictionary strings. I replaced all instances of \r with \\r and \n with \\n and it fixed my issue, properly returning escaped line breaks in the eval’ed dict.

ast.literal_eval(my_str.replace('\r','\\r').replace('\n','\\n'))
  .....

I faced a similar problem. I had a string which contained path to a folder in Windows e.g. C:\Users\ The problem is that \ is an escape character and so in order to use it in strings you need to add one more \.

Incorrect: C:\Users\

Correct: C:\\\Users\\\

I too had this problem, though there were answers here I want to an important point to this after / there should not be empty spaces.Be Aware of it

I also had this exact error message, for me the problem was fixed by adding an ” \”

It turns out that my long string, broken into about eight lines with ” \” at the very end, was missing a ” \” on one line.

Python IDLE didn’t specify a line number that this error was on, but it red-highlighted a totally correct variable assignment statement, throwing me off. The actual misshapen string statement (multiple lines long with ” \”) was adjacent to the statement being highlighted. Maybe this will help someone else.

In my case, I use Windows so I have to use double quotes instead of single.

C:\Users\Dr. Printer>python -mtimeit -s"a = 0"
100000000 loops, best of 3: 0.011 usec per loop

I was getting this error in postgresql function. I had a long SQL which I broke into multiple lines with \ for better readability. However, that was the problem. I removed all and made them in one line to fix the issue. I was using pgadmin III.

In my case with Mac OS X, I had the following statement:

model.export_srcpkg(platform, toolchain, 'mymodel_pkg.zip', 'mymodel.dylib’)

I was getting the error:

  File "<stdin>", line 1
model.export_srcpkg(platform, toolchain, 'mymodel_pkg.zip', 'mymodel.dylib’)
                                                                             ^
SyntaxError: EOL while scanning string literal

After I change to:

model.export_srcpkg(platform, toolchain, "mymodel_pkg.zip", "mymodel.dylib")

It worked…

David

You can try this:

s = r'long\annoying\path'

Your variable(s1) spans multiple lines. In order to do this (i.e you want your string to span multiple lines), you have to use triple quotes(“””).

s1="""some very long 
string............"""

In this case, three single quotations or three double quotations both will work! For example:

    """Parameters:
    ...Type something.....
    .....finishing statement"""

OR

    '''Parameters:
    ...Type something.....
    .....finishing statement'''

Most previous answers are correct and my answer is very similar to aaronasterling, you could also do 3 single quotations s1=”’some very long string…………”’

I had faced the same problem while accessing any hard drive directory. Then I solved it in this way.

 import os
 os.startfile("D:\folder_name\file_name") #running shortcut
 os.startfile("F:") #accessing directory

The picture above shows an error and resolved output.