Raw String Question

[Nick Craig-Wood]

Jim Garrison <jgarrison at troux.com> wrote:
>   >>> r"a\b"
>    'a\\b'
>   >>> r"a\"
>    SyntaxError: EOL while scanning string literal (<pyshell#45>, line 1)
>   >>> r"a\ "
>    'a\\ '
>   >>> r"a\""
>    'a\\"'
> 
>  It seems the parser is interpreting the backslash as an escape
>  character in a raw string if the backslash is the last character.
>  Is this expected?

Yes

http://docs.python.org/reference/lexical_analysis.html#string-literals

  Specifically, a raw string cannot end in a single backslash (since
  the backslash would escape the following quote character).

The usual way round this is like this

>>> r"a" "\\"
'a\\'
>>>

Which isn't terribly elegant, but it doesn't happen very often.

-- 
Nick Craig-Wood <nick at craig-wood.com> -- http://www.craig-wood.com/nick