'>>>' is the prompt of the interactive Python interpreter, meaning that the interpreter is ready to get Python statements typed in. It's occuring quite often in examples within the documentation of a Python program, in order to show which commands can be used and what will be the result of giving these commands to the interactive interpreter. For example, in a documentation of the print
statement, one could give this example:
>>> print "Hello world."
Hello world.
This would be an actual snippet of a session with the interactive Python interpreter.
An interesting feature in IPython is that it ignores leading >>>
, meaning that you can copy and paste code from such documentation without needing to remove the leading >>>
:
In [1]: >>> print "Hello world."
Hello world.
(The prompt in IPython is In [n]:
, where n
is counting the interactive commands issued.)