escape sequences and string comparisons

[jkndeja at my-deja.com]

Hello there

I've just discovered that when using the escape character in a string,
if the following character is _not_ an expected 'escape code'
character, the the backslash is passed on, rather than being dropped,
eg:

len("\'") == 1    # a back-tick
len("\\") == 1    # a quote character

# '\>' doesn't have a meaningful escape value
len("\>") != 1

I was expecting this latter case to give me a single '>' character, but
instead I seem to get a two-character string, '\>'.

Well, OK (although I'm still surprised). But I generated this string
('\>') using re.escape(), in order to compare strings with potentially
non-alphanumeric characters.

Since re.escape() simply uses the criterion of 'non-alphanumeric
character' to determine whether to escape a character, is there an
alternative function to 'escape only characters used in string literal
escapes', am I on my own, or am I missing something?

    Thanks
    Jon Nicoll


Sent via Deja.com
http://www.deja.com/