Kolmoislainausmerkkejä

Kolmoislainausmerkkejä, known in English as triple quotes or sometimes as triple apostrophes, are punctuation marks used in several programming languages and in certain text formatting contexts. Their primary function is to denote literal strings that span multiple lines. Unlike single or double quotes, which typically require escape characters to represent newlines within a string, triple quotes allow for the inclusion of line breaks directly within the quoted text.

In Python, triple quotes are commonly used for multiline strings and docstrings. Docstrings are a specific type of string literal used to document modules, functions, classes, and methods. When placed as the first statement in a definition, they are accessible via the `__doc__` attribute of the object they document.

Other programming languages, such as JavaScript and Java, do not natively support triple quotes for multiline strings in the same way Python does. However, similar functionality can often be achieved using template literals (JavaScript) or by concatenating strings with newline characters.

Beyond programming, triple quotes can occasionally be found in markup languages or text editors to define blocks of text that should be treated as a single, indivisible unit, especially when those blocks contain characters that might otherwise be interpreted as control characters or markup. The specific syntax and behavior of triple quotes can vary depending on the context in which they are used.

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