On 10/1/07, Guido van Rossum <guido@python.org> wrote:
Not in this case. It's more the philosophical distinction -- are raw strings meant primarily to hold regexes or Windows pathnames? These two use cases have opposite requirements for trailing backslash treatment. I know the original use case that caused them to be added to the language is regexes, and that's still the only one I use on a regular basis.
From a teaching (and simplicity) viewpoint, having these be "raw strings" instead of "regexp strings" would be better. The current behavior is a snag I always have to mention when teaching Python, and students are often caught by this once or twice.
As for my experience with regexps, the current behavior is only useful when using both single and double quotes in a single regexp string; I can't recall when I last did so. On 10/1/07, Clark Maurer <cmaurer@slickedit.com> wrote:
Two quotes should be one single quote. Otherwise, specifying both quote characters in regexes is an issue.
From the teaching point of view, the preferred behavior for "raw strings" would be no escaping for quotes - make them escape-less, period. Mixing single and double quotes would be done by concatenating strings. With Python's terse string concatenation I don't see the need for special escaping for only one character to support a rare use case.
- Tal