[Tutor] bug in eval() ? or doing something forbidden ?

[Steckel, Ralf]

Dear Tutor,

I'm trying to get the string representation of a string variable containing
the unicode representation of a string via eval(). This works fine as long
as I don't have any ' or " preceeded with a backslash in the representation.
Is there a bug in eval() or am I doing something wrong?

>From the first statement in the snapshot of Idle (see below), I would expect
that eval() should processes backslashes in the representation of unicode
strings and ' or " preceeded by a backslash is a valid token for an unicode
string.

Thanks for any help,

Ralf

Python 2.3.2 (#49, Oct  2 2003, 20:02:00) [MSC v.1200 32 bit (Intel)] on
win32
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IDLE 1.0      
>>> print u'\'abcd\"'
'abcd"
>>> a="u'\'abcd\"'"
>>> print eval(a)

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<pyshell#2>", line 1, in -toplevel-
    print eval(a)
  File "<string>", line 1
    u''abcd"'
          ^
SyntaxError: invalid syntax
>>> 
>>> a="u'\'abcd\''"
>>> print eval(a)

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<pyshell#9>", line 1, in -toplevel-
    print eval(a)
  File "<string>", line 1
    u''abcd''
          ^
SyntaxError: invalid syntax
>>>