escaping/encoding/formatting in python

[Steve Howell]

On Apr 5, 9:59 pm, rusi <rustompm... at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Apr 6, 6:56 am, Steve Howell <showel... at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> > One of the biggest nuisances for programmers, just beneath date/time
> > APIs in the pantheon of annoyances, is that we are constantly dealing
> > with escaping/encoding/formatting issues.
>
> [OT for this list]
> If you run
> $ find /usr/share/emacs/23.3/lisp/ -name '*.gz'|xargs zgrep '\\\\\\\\\\
> \\\\\\'
> you can get quite a few results.
>
> [Suitable assumptions: linux box with emacs installed]

You've one-upped me with 2-to-the-N backspace escaping.  I've written
useful scripts before with "\\\\\\\\" (scripts that went through three
levels of interpretation), but four is setting a new bar.  My use of
three backslashes back in the day was like Beamon's jump in the Mexico
City Olympics.  An amazing feat for its time, but every record
eventually gets broken.  Well done.