Windows file paths, again

[Lie Ryan]

Dan Guido wrote:
> Hi Anthony,
> 
> Thanks for your reply, but I don't think your tests have any control
> characters in them. Try again with a \v, a \n, or a \x in your input
> and I think you'll find it doesn't work as expected.

A path read from a file, config file, or winreg would never contain 
control characters unless they contains that a control character.

My crystal ball thinks that you used eval or exec somewhere in your 
script, which may cause a perfectly escaped path to get unescaped, like 
here:

# python 3
path = 'C:\\path\\to\\somewhere.txt'
script = 'open("%s")' % path    # this calls str(path)
exec(script)

OR

you stored the path incorrectly. Try seeing what exactly is stored in 
the registry using regedit.



Remember that escape characters doesn't really exist in the in-memory 
representation of the string. The escape characters exist only in string 
literals (i.e. source code) and when you print the string using repr().