 <p>A close equivalent in IronPython would be</p> <pre><code>Clearcore2.Licensing.LicenseKeys.Keys = Array[str]([r"""&lt;?xml version=""1.0"" encoding=""utf-8""?&gt; &lt;license_key&gt; &lt;company_name&gt;Company &lt;/company_name&gt; &lt;product_name&gt;ProcessingFramework&lt;/product_name&gt; &lt;features&gt;WiffReaderSDK&lt;/features&gt; &lt;key_data&gt; 2F923C31D1E7E16B191EF2F87DCA7F15831A3F18DED11E05582A98822== &lt;/key_data&gt; &lt;/license_key&gt;"""]) </code></pre> <p>The <strong>@</strong> in C# specifies a <a href="http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa691090%28v=vs.71%29.aspx" rel="nofollow">verbatim string literal</a>. This means that no escape sequences etc. are handled and that the string may span multiple lines. A <a href="http://docs.python.org/release/2.5.2/ref/strings.html" rel="nofollow">raw, triple quoted string</a> should be the equivalent literal.</p> <p>Your initial code might fail because of the encoding and or mode you read the file with. Depending on what should happen with the file data, you might want to specify an <a href="http://docs.python.org/2/tutorial/inputoutput.html#reading-and-writing-files" rel="nofollow">alternate mode</a> for opening the file (e.g. <strong>b</strong> for <em>binary</em>) or use a .NET BCL function like <a href="http://msdn.microsoft.com/de-de/library/ms143369.aspx" rel="nofollow">File.ReadAllText</a> which you can check from C# as well.</p>