awesome print trivia from Robert Xiao

porting-code-to-python-3-with-2to3.html

@@ -53,7 +53,7 @@
 <li>To print a blank line, call <code>print()</code> without any arguments.
 <li>To print a single value, call <code>print()</code> with one argument
 <li>To print two values separated by a space, call <code>print()</code> with two arguments.
-<li>This one is a little tricky. In Python 2, if you ended a <code>print</code> statement with a comma, it would print the values separated by spaces, then print a trailing space, then stop without printing a carriage return. In Python 3, the way to do this is to pass <code>end=' '</code> as a keyword argument to the <code>print()</code> function. The <code>end</code> argument defaults to <code>'\n'</code> (a carriage return), so overriding it will suppress the carriage return after printing the other arguments.
+<li>This one is a little tricky. In Python 2, if you ended a <code>print</code> statement with a comma, it would print the values separated by spaces, then print a trailing space, then stop without printing a carriage return. (Technically, it&#8217;s a little more complicated than that. The <code>print</code> statement in Python 2 used a now-deprecated attribute called <var>softspace</var>. Instead of printing a space, Python 2 would set <code>sys.stdout.softspace</code> to 1. The space character wasn&#8217;t really printed until something else got printed on the same line. If the next <code>print</code> statement printed a carriage return, <code>sys.stdout.softspace</code> would be set to 0 and the space would never be printed. You probably never noticed the difference unless your application was sensitive to the presence or absence of trailing whitespace in <code>print</code>-generated output.) In Python 3, the way to do this is to pass <code>end=' '</code> as a keyword argument to the <code>print()</code> function. The <code>end</code> argument defaults to <code>'\n'</code> (a carriage return), so overriding it will suppress the carriage return after printing the other arguments.
 <li>In Python 2, you could redirect the output to a pipe&nbsp;&mdash;&nbsp;like <code>sys.stderr</code>&nbsp;&mdash;&nbsp;by using the <code>>>pipe_name</code> syntax. In Python 3, the way to do this is to pass the pipe in the <code>file</code> keyword argument. The <code>file</code> argument defaults to <code>sys.stdout</code> (standard out), so overriding it will output to a different pipe instead.
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