Raw String Question

Miles semanticist at gmail.com
Thu Mar 12 19:21:41 EDT 2009


On Thu, Mar 12, 2009 at 3:28 PM, Jim Garrison wrote:
> OK, I'm curious as to the reasoning behind saying that
>
>   When an 'r' or 'R' prefix is present, a character following a
>   backslash is included in the string without change, and all
>   backslashes are left in the string.
>
> which sounds reasonable, but then saying in effect "Oh wait, let's
> introduce a special case and make it impossible to have a literal
> backslash as the last character of a string without doubling it".

That's not a special case; that's the *opposite* of a special case.

> So you have a construct (r'...') whose sole reason for existence
> is to ignore escapes, but it REQUIRES an escape mechanism for one
> specific case (which comes up frequently in Windows pathnames).

The backslash still IS an escape character, it just behaves
differently than it does for a non-raw string.

> At the very least the "all backslashes are left in the string" quote
> from the Lexical Analysis page (rendered in italics no less) needs to
> be reworded to include the exception instead of burying this in a
> parenthetical side-comment.

There is no exception.  All backslashes are left in the string.  The
impossibility of ending a raw string in an unescaped backslash is also
rendered in italics.

-Miles



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