[Python-ideas] PEP 8: raw strings & regular expressions

[Terry Reedy]

On 10/21/2015 10:24 PM, Yury Selivanov wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I was a little bit frustrated that Sublime Text and Atom didn't support
> all Python 3 features (mainly annotations & async/await syntax), so I
> decided to write a new highlighter:
>
>      https://github.com/MagicStack/MagicPython
>
> In the process, we had to make a decision on how to highlight raw string
> literals -- r''.  Many existing highlighters assume that all raw strings
> are regexps, and highlight them as such, i.e. '\s' and '\n' will be
> highlighted.

What 3rd parth editors do is their business.

> I think that it might be a good idea to state the following in PEP 8:
>
> - use r'...' strings for raw strings that describe regular expressions;
> these strings might be highlighted specially in some editors.
>
> - use R'...' strings for raw strings; editors *should not* highlight
> any escaped characters in them.
>
> What do you think?

I think it a bad idea.  For beginners on Windows, 
r'windows\path\file.py' might be more common than r're'.  I have never 
seen R used.

If you wanted to promote the use of the currently rare R for REs, and 
have editors specially mark raw literals with this special prefix, I 
would not mind.

-- 
Terry Jan Reedy