[New-bugs-announce] [issue44308] Raw Strings lack parody

[Nicholas Willhite]

New submission from Nicholas Willhite <willhite.nicholas at gmail.com>:

I'm really sure this isn't filed correctly. I'm a total noob to this process, so feel free to redirect me. :) 

Bytes can be defined as a function, or a prefixed series. You can prefix a series with "b" and get the expected data type. You can also use the builtin functions "bytes" to get the same structure:

  bytes('foo\bar', 'utf-8') == b'foo\bar'
  True

But there's no builtin function for r'foo\bar' that gives you 'foo\\bar'.

This would be really handy for applications that accept a regular expression. If that regex was part of the source code, I'd just r'foo\bar' to get the expected string. Being able to accept something like bytes and do:

  data = b'foo\bar'
  raw_string(data)
  'foo\\bar'

would be really useful for applications that accept a regex as input. 

Is there an obvious way to do this that I'm not seeing? Has my google-foo failed me? Feels like a function that should exist in the stdlib.

Again, really sure I'm not "doing this correctly." So please direct me! :) 

Appreciative,
-Nick Willhite

----------
components: Unicode
messages: 395064
nosy: Nicholas Willhite, ezio.melotti, vstinner
priority: normal
severity: normal
status: open
title: Raw Strings lack parody
type: behavior
versions: Python 3.8

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Python tracker <report at bugs.python.org>
<https://bugs.python.org/issue44308>
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