In Python, how are triple quotes (""") considered comments by the IDE?

Question

My CS teacher told me that """ triple quotations are used as comments, yet I learned it as strings with line-breaks and indentations. This got me thinking - does python completely triple quote lines outside of relevant statements?

"""is this completely ignored like a comment"""

or, is the computer actually considering this?

Answer 1

Triple quoted strings are used as comment by many developers but it is actually not a comment, it is similar to regular strings in python but it allows the string to be in multi-line. You will find no official reference for triple quoted strings to be a comment.

In python, there is only one type of comment that starts with hash # and can contain only a single line of text.

According to PEP 257, it can however be used as a docstring, which is again not really a comment.

def foo():
    """
    Developer friendly text for describing the purpose of function
    Some test cases used by different unit testing libraries
    """
    ...  # body of the function

You can just assign them to a variable as you do with single quoted strings:

x = """a multi-line text
enclosed by
triple quotes
"""

Furthermore, if you try in repl, triple quoted strings get printed, had it really been a comment, should it have been printed?:

>>> #comment
>>> """triple quoted"""
'triple quoted'