I'm assuming the real issue is wanting to make IronPython pass as much of the CPython test suite as possible. I am okay with interpretation (B) in this case -- I can totally see that other parsing strategies have no use for adding the '\n' character to the end of the string. But I don't want to declare that CPython is wrong to show the '\n' -- it seems a pretty harmless artifact. So fixing the tests to allow it either way sounds good.