Embedding a literal "\u" in a unicode raw string.

[Romano Giannetti]

Thinker <thinker <at> branda.to> writes:

> 
> 
> > s = ur"añado $\uparrow$"
> >
> > Which gave an error because the \u escape is interpreted in raw
> > unicode strings, too. So I found that the only way to solve this is
> >  to write:
> >
> > s = unicode(r"añado $\uparrow$", "utf-8")
> >
> > or
> >
> > s = ur"añado $\u005cuparrow$"
> >
> >
> The backslash '\' is a meta-char that escapes the string.  You can
> escape the char as following string
> u"....\\u....'
> insert another '\' before it.
> 

(Answering this and the other off thread answer by Diez)

Well, I have simplified too much. The problem is, when writing LaTeX snippets, a
lot of backslashed are involved. So the un-raw string is difficult to read
because all those doubled \\, and the raw string is just handy. Moreover, that
way I can copy-and-paste LaTeX code between ur"""   """ marks, 

Searching more, I even found a thread in python-dev where Guido himself seemed
convinced that this "\u" interpratation in raw strings is at least a bit
disappointing:

http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2007-May/073042.html

but I have seen later that it will still here in 3.0. That means that all my
unicode(r"\uparrow", "utf-8") will break... sigh.

Thanks anyway,

Romano