shortest python quine?

Question

_=\'_=%r;print _%%_\';print _%_

Is this the shortest possible python quine, or can it be done better? This one seems to improve on all the entrie

Answer 1

Here is another similar to postylem's answer.

Python 3.6:

print((lambda s:s%s)('print((lambda s:s%%s)(%r))'))

Python 2.7:

print(lambda s:s%s)('print(lambda s:s%%s)(%r)')

Answer 2

In a slightly non-literal approach, taking 'shortest' to mean short in terms of the number of statements as well as just the character count, I have one here that doesn't include any semicolons.

print(lambda x:x+str((x,)))('print(lambda x:x+str((x,)))',)

In my mind this contends, because it's all one function, whereas others are multiple. Does anyone have a shorter one like this?

Edit: User flornquake made the following improvement (backticks for repr() to replace str() and shave off 6 characters):

print(lambda x:x+`(x,)`)('print(lambda x:x+`(x,)`)',)

Answer 3

As of Python 3.8 I have a new quine! I'm quite proud of it because until now I have never created my own. I drew inspiration from _='_=%r;print(_%%_)';print(_%_), but made it into a single function (with only 2 more characters). It uses the new walrus operator.

print((_:='print((_:=%r)%%_)')%_)

Answer 4

Technically, the shortest Python quine is the empty file. Apart from this trivial case:

Since Python's print automatically appends a newline, the quine is actually _='_=%r;print _%%_';print _%_\n (where \n represents a single newline character in the file).

Answer 5

Python 3.8

exec(s:='print("exec(s:=%r)"%s)')

Answer 6

I am strictly against your solution.

The formatting prarameter % is definitively a too advanced high level language function. If such constructs are allowed, I would say, that import must be allowed as well. Then I can construct a shorter Quine by introducing some other high level language construct (which, BTW is much less powerful than the % function, so it is less advanced):

Here is a Unix shell script creating such a quine.py file and checking it really works:

echo 'import x' > quine.py
echo "print 'import x'" > x.py
python quine.py | cmp - quine.py; echo $?

outputs 0

Yes, that's cheating, like using %. Sorry.