[Tutor] quoting and escaping

[Jon Crump]

All,

Something I don't understand (so what else is new?) about quoting and 
escaping:

>>> s = """ "some" \"thing\" """
>>> s
' "some" "thing" '

I've got strings like this:

s = """[{"title" : "Egton, Yorkshire", "start" : new Date(1201,1,4), 
"description" : "Hardy's long name: Egton, Yorkshire. <br> "},
{"title" : "Guilsborough, Yorkshire", "start" : new Date(1201,1,5), 
"description" : "Hardy's long name: Guilsborough, Yorkshire. <br> 
<img src=\"document.png\" style=\"cursor: pointer\" 
onclick=\"SimileAjax.WindowManager.cancelPopups();show_next('tab3');pager('006'); 
return false\"/>pg.006: 1201-02-05 to 1202-03-07"}]"""

Thanks to your good help, I can re.sub() to translate the new Date() 
objects into "datetime.date()" instances, thus:

[{"title" : "Egton, Yorkshire", "start" : "date(1201, 02, 04)", 
"description" : "Hardy's long name: Egton, Yorkshire. <br> "},
{"title" : "Guilsborough, Yorkshire", "start" : "date(1201, 02, 05)", 
"description" : "Hardy's long name: Guilsborough, Yorkshire. <br> 
<img src="document.png" style="cursor: pointer" 
onclick="SimileAjax.WindowManager.cancelPopups();show_next('tab3');pager('006'); 
return false"/>pg.006: 1201-02-05 to 1202-03-07"}]

with the quotation marks, eval() evaluates these date() instances 
correctly; however, python treats " and \" as if they were identical so I 
wind up with bad syntax: multiple doublequoted strings in a dictionary 
value. How can I identify \" in a regex so that I can replace it with 
something that eval() won't choke on?

This is pretty confusing to me, so I've tried to provide clarification 
below:

>>> a = """{"aKey" : "aValue"}"""
>>> eval(a)
{'aKey': 'aValue'}

## so far so good, but then:

>>> b = """{"aKey" : "a value with \"literal quotes\" in it"}"""
>>> eval(b)
Traceback (most recent call last):
   File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
   File "<string>", line 1
     {"aKey" : "a value with "literal quotes" in it"}
                                    ^
SyntaxError: invalid syntax