[Python-ideas] Alternate quote delimiters

[Tal Einat]

On 5/13/07, Greg Ewing <greg.ewing at canterbury.ac.nz> wrote:
>
> Jim Jewett wrote:
>
> > How serious is this problem?
> >
> >     r"The Windows path is C:\Foo\Bar\Baz\X"[:-1]
> >
> > is awkward, but ... how much complexity do we want to incur avoiding it?
>
> If you use os.path.join and friends to manipulate your
> paths (as you should!) you will hardly ever have to deal
> with a path containing a trailing backslash in the first
> place. So I wouldn't worry about it much.


When learning Python, new users often get bitten by this. Simple learning
exercises often leave os.path for later, and use simpler hard-coded file
paths instead. When teaching Python, this is one more sharp edge I'm forced
to warn new users about.

I also hear people complaining about this when using Python for simple
automation scripts, where hard-coded paths are common, and using os.path can
easily double the amount of code and its complexity for no extra
functionality.

(Yes, the [:-1] hack works, but it's ugly, and Python should be beautiful.)

I'm sure the "completely remove escapes from raw strings" PEP will solve
this issue, and I'm looking forward to it.

- Tal
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