From the article: """ It's a little-known feature of C that if you put two string literals next to each other in the source code, they get concatenated: c

From the article: """ It's a little-known feature of C that if you put two string literals next to each other in the source code, they get concatenated: char *helloworld = "hello, " "world!"; """ That's a good tip that actually works in other languages too. It helps in Python, for example, when creating long strings. Wrapping parentheses around the string and using the quote-continuation rule makes it nice and easy to read. For example: foo = ('hello world this is ' 'a long string') is better than: foo = 'hello world this is ' + \ 'a long string' ...for two reasons. It avoids string concatenation (the "+" operator) and it avoids the backslash.