Guido van Rossum wrote:
On 10/1/07, Clark Maurer
wrote: Guido, I'm not proposing both escape mechanisms. Quote-doubling is a mechanism which should be used ONLY for raw strings. Let be very specific how this is done:
r"Here's a string with a single quote" r'"Heres a double quoted string"' r'["'']' # This regex has both quotes in it r"[""']" # This regex has both quotes in it
Quote doubling is only for the quote you started the raw string with. This would be consistent with C#, REXX, and Slick-C. It sounds like you've never used a language with this construct. It's very natural to me. This would make the raw strings implementation complete.
As long as we're making personal comments, who cares about REXX or Slick-C? How many users do they have? And yes, I've used this for years in Pascal, so I'm well familiar with it. The whole problem is that when using regexes you *do* have to deal with both escape mechanisms (one for the string literal tokenization and one for the re module). And that's unacceptable for me.
With pythons current 4 different ways to quote, I don't think quote doubling is needed. Yes, it's the duel escape mechanisms that makes regexes more complex than it needs to be. Ron