Pythonic way to create a long multi-line string

Question

I have a very long query. I would like to split it in several lines in Python. A way to do it in JavaScript would be using several sentences and joining them with a +<

Answer 1

Your actual code shouldn't work, you are missing whitespaces at the end of "lines" (eg: role.descr as roleFROM...)

There is triplequotes for multiline string:

string = """line
  line2
  line3"""

It will contain the line breaks and extra spaces, but for SQL that's not a problem.

Answer 2

tl;dr: Use """\ and """ to wrap the string, as in

string = """\
This is a long string
spanning multiple lines.
"""

From the official python documentation:

String literals can span multiple lines. One way is using triple-quotes: """...""" or '''...'''. End of lines are automatically included in the string, but it’s possible to prevent this by adding a \ at the end of the line. The following example:

print("""\
Usage: thingy [OPTIONS]
     -h                        Display this usage message
     -H hostname               Hostname to connect to
""")

produces the following output (note that the initial newline is not included):

Usage: thingy [OPTIONS]
     -h                        Display this usage message
     -H hostname               Hostname to connect to

Answer 3

For defining a long string inside a dict, keeping the newlines but omitting the spaces, I ended up defining the string in a constant like this:

LONG_STRING = \
"""
This is a long sting
that contains newlines.
The newlines are important.
"""

my_dict = {
   'foo': 'bar',
   'string': LONG_STRING
}