Solve SyntaxError: EOL while scanning string literal in Python

Hello friends, In my last post I’ve discussed the common problem Python Programmers face i.e. unexpected EOF while parsing and in today’s post, I’ll be discussing EOL while scanning string literal.

But do you exactly know what is this error all about and how we can remove it from our python code?

So, what exactly an EOL is?

EOL stands for End Of Line. This means we have now come to the end of our line and the error related to this is shown below with example code.

def printName():
    return "This is a test basestring
    
printName()

Now, after running this piece of code, I get an error something similar to this.

File "main.py", line 2
  return "This is a test basestring


SyntaxError: EOL while scanning string literal


...Program finished with exit code 1
Press ENTER to exit the console

Now the above code contains one error and the error is that the return in the printName( ) function in the above code is not closed properly. We can see that it doesn’t have the closing quote ".

Now, when we tried to run this code, it showed us SyntaxError: EOL while scanning string literal.

Now the problem is our return keyword has some syntax error. This lead to the SyntaxError: EOL while scanning string literal. To overcome this type of error in our python file, we need to ensure that we have not left any part of our string unclosed or not in proper syntax. I hope this is clear to you.

Sometimes we try to print our string to multiple lines also and in that case what happens is that, let’s see this with an example:

def multiLine():
    return "This is a new line
                              and this is the next line"
multiLine()

Now, when we will try to run this code, it will give us the same error which we got above,

To overcome this type of error while using the string spreading into multiple line, we can use the ''' or """. We can wrap our code into the triple quote. Both quotes single and double quote will work fine.

Here you can see that our code is working fine and we are good to go.

Well, this was all about the EOL and the error related to it. If you stuck into any kind of error, don’t forget to google it and try to debug it on your own. This will teach you how to debug on your own as someone might have faced a similar problem earlier.

If you still don’t find any solution for your problem, you can ask your doubt in the comment’s section below and we’ll get back to you🤓.

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