Multi-Line Strings in commands

Consider a function get_html_title designed to extract the title from an HTML page. Here is some python code to test the function:

 1 >>> html = '''
 2 <html>
 3 <head>
 4 <title>This is the page title</title>
 5 </head>
 6 <body>
 7 This is the body
 8 </body>
 9 </html>
 10 '''
 11 >>> title = get_html_title(html)
 12 >>> assert(title == "This is the page title")

Putting this directly into a doctest results in an exception, such as:

Failed example:
 html = '''
Exception raised:
 Traceback (most recent call last):
 File "C:\Python24\lib\doctest.py", line 1243, in __run
 compileflags, 1) in test.globs
 File "<doctest sample.tests[1]>", line 1
 html = '''
 ^
 SyntaxError: EOF while scanning triple-quoted string

The solution is to add the command continuation characters:

 1 >>> html = '''
 2 ... <html>
 3 ... <head>
 4 ... <title>This is the page title</title>
 5 ... </head>
 6 ... <body>
 7 ... This is the body
 8 ... </body>
 9 ... </html>
 10 ... '''
 11 >>> title = get_html_title(html)
 12 >>> assert(title == "This is the page title")

Multi-Line Strings in output

Blank lines in the output need to be specially handled. For example, the following doctest will fail:

 1 >>> test = "Here is a blank line\n\nBlank line is above"
 2 >>> print test
 3 Here is a blank line
 4 
 5 Blank line is above

This is because the blank line is used to seperate commands and comments. With Python 2.4, a <BLANKLINE> keyword was added, so the proper doctest is now:

 1 >>> test = "Here is a blank line\n\nBlank line is above"
 2 >>> print test
 3 Here is a blank line
 4 <BLANKLINE>
 5 Blank line is above