Quine is a program which takes no input but outputs a copy of its own code. We have discussedquine in C.
The shortest possible quine in python is just a single line of code!
_='_=%r;print _%%_';print _%_In case of Python3.x
_='_=%r;print _(%%)_';print (_%_)Explanation:
The above code is a classic use of string formatting. Firstly, we are defining a variable _ and assigning it ‘_=%r;print _%%_’. Secondly, we are printing _%_ . Here we are printing _ with _ as input to string formatting. So %r in _ gets the value of _. You can even use %s instead of %r . We used double % in ‘_=%r;print _%%_’ to escape % .
But you may say that the below code is the smallest, right!
print open(__file__).read()You need to note that it is indeed the smallest python program that can print its own source code but it is not a quine because a quine should not use open() function to print out its source code.
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