On 2019-08-09 23:56, Steven D'Aprano wrote:

I'm not trying to be confrontational, I'm trying to understand your
use-case(s) and see if it would be broken by the planned change to
string escapes.


On Fri, Aug 09, 2019 at 03:18:29PM -0700, Glenn Linderman wrote:

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 \.

You said you never used raw strings in the documentation. I read that as
doc strings. What sort of documentation are you writing that isn't a doc
string but is inside your .py files where the difference between raw and
regular strings is meaningful?

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 \.

If you don't use raw strings for paths, you get to explain why your
program uses \\ and all the rest use \ *wink*

If they're Windows end users, they won't be reading your source code and
will never know how you represent hard-coded paths in the source code.

If they're Windows developers, they ought to be aware that the Windows
file system API allows / anywhere you can use \ and it is the
common convention in Python to use forward slashes.

I'm also curious why the string needs to *end* with a backslash. Both of
these are the same path:

     C:\foo\bar\baz\
     C:\foo\bar\baz

The only time it's required is for the root directory of a drive:

C:\