What's the Scoop on \\ for Paths? (Win)

[W. eWatson]

Steve Holden wrote:

> You need to read up on string literals is all. "\\" is simply the
> literal representation of a string containing a single backslash. This
> comes about because string literals are allowed to contain special
> "escape sequences" which are introduced by a backslash; since this gives
> the backslash a special meaning in string literals we also have to use
> an escape sequence ("\\") to represent a backslash.
> 
> In practice you will find that
> 
> a) Many Windows APIs (but not the command line) are just as happy with a
> forward slash as a backslash to separate file path components; and
> 
> b) The best practice is to build filenames using the routines provided
> in the os.path module, which guarantees to give results correct for the
> current platform.
> 
> regards
>  Steve
Basic sys functions brought out the \ separator for paths.

What am I missing here? Looks OK to me.


 >>> abc=r'xyz\\'
 >>> abc
'xyz\\\\'
 >>> print abc
xyz\\
 >>> abc.replace(r'\',r'z')
	
SyntaxError: invalid syntax
 >>> abc
'xyz\\\\'