title: Assignment with line continuation - Python
body: <p>What is the preferred style for assigning values to variables when the variables are nested several levels deep, have fairly long names, and are being assigned fairly long values/expressions.</p>
  
  <p>For example:</p>
  
  <pre><code>if this:
      if that:
          if here:
              if there:
                   big_variable['big_key']['big_value'] = another_big_variable_that_pushes_line_over_79_characters
                   other_thing = something
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>The character-limit breaches are only in the single digits, but I want to clean up my code so that it follows PEP 8 as faithfully as possible.  I've done the following, but I am still fairly new to python, and I'm not sure if it's the sort of thing that would make an experienced python programmer cringe:</p>
  
  <pre><code>if this:
      if that:
          if here:
              if there:
                  big_variable['big_key']['big_value'] = \
                      another_big_variable_that_pushes_line_over_79_characters
                  other_thing = something
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I get the impression that the line continuation character is somewhat taboo; but I can't really think of a cleaner solution than the one I have if I'm working with these big dictionaries and I can't make a clean break in the middle of the variable name.</p>