On 8/9/2019 2:53 PM, Steven D'Aprano wrote:

On Fri, Aug 09, 2019 at 01:12:59PM -0700, Glenn Linderman wrote:

The reason I never use raw strings is in the documentation, it is 
because \ still has a special meaning, and the first several times I 
felt the need for raw strings, it was for directory names that wanted to 
end with \ and couldn't.

Can you elaborate? I find it unlikely that I would ever want a docstring

I didn't mention docstring. I just wanted a string with a path name ending in \.

that ends with a backslash:

    def func():
        r"""Documentation goes here...
        more documentation...
        ending with a Windows path that needs a trailing backslash
        like this C:\directory\"""

That seems horribly contrived. Why use backslashes in the path when the 
strong recommendation is to use forward slashes?

Windows users are used to seeing backslashes in paths, I don't care to be the one to explain why my program uses / and all the rest use \.

And why not solve the problem by simply moving the closing quotes to the 
next line, as PEP 8 recommends?

        r"""Documentation ...
        C:\directory\
        """

This isn't my problem, I wasn't using docstrings, and including a newline in a path name doesn't work. I suppose one could "solve" the problem by using

"c:\directory\ "[ :-1]

but that is just as annoying as

"c:\\directory\\"

and back when I discovered the problem, I was still learning Python, and didn't think of the above solution either.



[...]

Even in a raw literal, quotes can be escaped with a backslash

Indeed, they're not so much "raw" strings as only slightly blanched 
strings.