Unrecognized escape sequences in string literals

[Ethan Furman]

Douglas Alan wrote:
> On Aug 11, 2:00 pm, Steven D'Aprano <st... at REMOVE-THIS-
> cybersource.com.au> wrote:
> 
> 
>>>test.cpp:1:1: warning: unknown escape sequence '\y'
>>
>>Isn't that a warning, not a fatal error? So what does temp contain?
> 
> 
> My "Annotated C++ Reference Manual" is packed, and surprisingly in
> Stroustrup's Third Edition, there is no mention of the issue in the
> entire 1,000 pages. But Microsoft to the rescue:
> 
>      If you want a backslash character to appear within a string,
>      you must type two backslashes (\\)
> 
> (From http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/69ze775t.aspx)
> 
> The question of what any specific C++ does if you ignore the warning
> is irrelevant, as such behavior in C++ is almost *always* undefined.
> Hence the warning.
> 
> |>ouglas

Almost always undefined?  Whereas with Python, and some memorization or 
a small table/list nearby, you can easily *know* what you will get.

Mind you, I'm not really vested in how Python *should* handle 
backslashes one way or the other, but I am glad it has rules that it 
follows for consitent results, and I don't have to break out a byte-code 
editor to find out what's in my string literal.

~Ethan~