Raw strings and escaping

[Duncan Booth]

Jon Ribbens <jon+usenet at unequivocal.co.uk> wrote:

> I presume there was originally some reason for this bizarre behaviour
> - it'd be interesting to know what it is/was, if anyone knows?
> 
See the FAQ for the explanation:

http://www.python.org/doc/faq/general/#why-can-t-raw-strings-r-strings-end-with-a-backslash

The idea is that if you use raw strings for regular expressions you can 
write things like:

  pattern = r'[\'"]'

if the raw string simply ignored the backslash altogether it would be much 
harder to write regular expressions that contain both sorts of quotes.