On 10/1/07, Tal Einat <taleinat@gmail.com> wrote:
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.
I think this is the crux of the matter. It's not really about comparing use of regular expressions with use of Windows paths. It's about comparing use of regular expressions *that include both types of quotes* and use of Windows paths. Of course, I don't really know how to perform this sort of comparison on a large scale either. ;-)
From the teaching point of view, the preferred behavior for "raw strings" would be no escaping for quotes - make them escape-less, period.
Exactly my feeling. Thanks for putting it so clearly. =) STeVe -- I'm not *in*-sane. Indeed, I am so far *out* of sane that you appear a tiny blip on the distant coast of sanity. --- Bucky Katt, Get Fuzzy