Simple statements must be complete on a single Logical Line. Starting in Chapter 7, Truth, Comparison and Conditional Processing we'll look at compound statements, which have indented suites of statements, and which span multiple Logical Lines. The rest of these rules will define how Logical Lines are built from Physical Lines through a few Line Joining rules.

Physical Lines are defined by the platform; they'll end in standard \n or the Windows ASCII CR LF sequence (\r\n).

Comments start with the # character outside a quoted string; comments end at the end of the physical line. These are not part of a statement; they may occur on a line by themselves or at the end of a statement.

Coding-Scheme Comments. Special comments that are by VIM or EMACS can be included in the first or second line of a Python file. For example, # -*- coding: latin1 -*-

Explicit Line Joining. A \ at the end of a physical line joins it to the next physical line to make a logical line. This escapes the usual meaning of the line end sequence. The two or three-character sequences (\\n or \\r\n) are treated as a single space.

Implicit Line Joining. Expressions with ()'s, []'s or {}'s can be split into multiple physical lines.

Blank Lines. When entering statements interactively, an extra blank line is treated as the end of an indented block in a compound statement. Otherwise, blank lines have no signficance.

Indentation. The embedded suite of statements in a compound statement must be indented by a consistent number of spaces or tabs. When entering statements interactively or in an editor that knows Python syntax (like IDLE), the indentation will happen automatically; you will outdent by typing a single backspace . When using another text editor, you will be most successful if you configure your editor to use four spaces in place of a tab. This gives your programs a consisent look and makes them portable among a wide variety of editors.

Whitespace at the beginning of a line is part of indentation, and is significant. Whitespace elsewhere within a line is not significant. Feel free to space things out so that they read more like English and less like computer-ese.