as pydoc-- tool for extracting documentation from objects later in the bookyou'll see that pydoc can also render its reports in html format for display on web browser you can also ask for help on an entire string ( help( ))but you may get more or less help than you want to see--information about every string method in older pythonsand probably no help at all in newer versions because strings are treated specially it' generally better to ask about specific method both dir and help also accept as arguments either real object (like our string )or the name of data type (like strlistand dictthe latter form returns the same list for dir but shows full type details for helpand allows you to ask about specific method via type name ( help on str replacefor more detailsyou can also consult python' standard library reference manual or commercially published reference booksbut dir and help are the first level of documentation in python other ways to code strings so farwe've looked at the string object' sequence operations and type-specific methods python also provides variety of ways for us to code stringswhich we'll explore in greater depth later for instancespecial characters can be represented as backslash escape sequenceswhich python displays in \xnn hexadecimal escape notationunless they represent printable characterss ' \nb\tclen( \ is end-of-line\ is tab each stands for just one character ord('\ ' \ is byte with the binary value in ascii ' \ \ clen( ' \ \ \ binary zero bytedoes not terminate string non-printables are displayed as \xnn hex escapes python allows strings to be enclosed in single or double quote characters--they mean the same thing but allow the other type of quote to be embedded with an escape (most programmers prefer single quotesit also allows multiline string literals enclosed in triple quotes (single or double)--when this form is usedall the lines are concatenated togetherand end-of-line characters are added where line breaks appear this is minor syntactic conveniencebut it' useful for embedding things like multiline htmlxmlor json code in python scriptand stubbing out lines of code temporarily--just add three quotes above and belowmsg ""aaaaaaaaaaaaa strings