[New-bugs-announce] [issue29315] \b requires raw strings or to be escaped. Update docs with that hint?

[Mike Lissner]

New submission from Mike Lissner:

I just ran into a funny corner case I imagine others are aware of. When you write "\b" in Python, it is a single character: "\x08". So if you try to write a regex like:

words = '\b(.*)\b'

That won't work. But using a raw string will:

words = r'\b(.*)\b'

As will escaping it in this horrible fashion:

words = '\\b(.*)\\b'

I believe this doesn't affect any of the other regex flags, so I wonder if it's worth adding something to the docs to warn about this. I just spent a bunch of time trying to figure out why it seemed like \b wasn't working. A little tip in the docs would have gone a LONG way.

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assignee: docs at python
components: Documentation
messages: 285751
nosy: Mike.Lissner, docs at python
priority: normal
severity: normal
status: open
title: \b requires raw strings or to be escaped. Update docs with that hint?
type: enhancement
versions: Python 2.7, Python 3.3, Python 3.4, Python 3.5, Python 3.6, Python 3.7

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Python tracker <report at bugs.python.org>
<http://bugs.python.org/issue29315>
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