Python: What does a semicolon do?

2019-01-04 12:22发布

I got a function online to help me with my current project and it had semicolons on some of the lines. I was wondering why? Is it to break the function?

def containsAny(self, strings=[]):
    alphabet = 'abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz0123456789'
    for string in strings:
        for char in string:
            if char in alphabet: return 1;
    return 0;

The function I got online with little modification:

for string in strings:
    for char in string:
        if char in alphabet: return 1;

Is this ^ saying the following?

if char in alphabet:
    return 1
    break

4条回答
Rolldiameter
2楼-- · 2019-01-04 13:05

As other answers point out, the semicolon does nothing there. It's a separator (e.g. print 1;print 2). But it does not work like this: def func():print 1;print 2;;print'Defined!' (;; is a syntax error). Out of habit, people tend to use it (as it is required in languages such as C/Java...).

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Rolldiameter
3楼-- · 2019-01-04 13:08

The semicolon here does not do anything. People who come from C/C++/Java/(many other language) backgrounds tend to use the semicolon out of habit.

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家丑人穷心不美
4楼-- · 2019-01-04 13:15

The semicolon does nothing in the code you show.

I suspect this is someone who programs in another language (C, Java, ...) that requires semicolons at the end of statements and it's just a habit (happens to me sometimes too).

If you want to put several Python statements on the same line, you can use a semi-colon to separate them, see this Python Doc:

A suite is a group of statements controlled by a clause. A suite can be one or more semicolon-separated simple statements on the same line as the header, following the header’s colon, or it can be one or more indented statements on subsequent lines

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Summer. ? 凉城
5楼-- · 2019-01-04 13:15

Programmers of C, C++, and Java are habituated of using a semicolon to tell the compiler that this is the end of a statement, but for Python this is not the case.

The reason is that in Python, newlines are an unambiguous way of separating code lines; this is by design, and the way this works has been thoroughly thought through. As a result, Python code is perfectly readable and unambiguous without any special end-of-statement markers (apart from the newline).

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