I'm sort of mystified by the print hex to char conversion

[Wojtek Walczak]

On Sat, 18 Apr 2009 11:45:09 -0700 (PDT), grocery_stocker wrote:
> I'm just really not seeing how something like x63 and/or x61 gets
> converted by 'print' to the corresponding chars in the following
> output...
...
>>>> print "\x63h\x61d"
> chad
>>>>
>
> Does print just do this magically?

Not only print does that:

>>> a='\x63h\x61d'
>>> a
'chad'
>>> print a
chad
>>> import sys
>>> sys.stdout.write(a)
chad>>> eval(a)
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
  File "<string>", line 1, in <module>
NameError: name 'chad' is not defined

The policy is described here:

http://www.python.org/doc/2.4.4/ref/strings.html

Unlike Standard C, all unrecognized escape sequences are left in the
string unchanged, i.e., the backslash is left in the string. (This
behavior is useful when debugging: if an escape sequence is mistyped,
the resulting output is more easily recognized as broken.)

So, as long as the escape sequence is recognized it is changed
accordingly.

-- 
Regards,
Wojtek Walczak,
http://tosh.pl/gminick/