[Python-ideas] PEP 8: raw strings & regular expressions

[Yury Selivanov]

Hi,

I was a little bit frustrated that Sublime Text and Atom didn't support
all Python 3 features (mainly annotations & async/await syntax), so I
decided to write a new highlighter:

     https://github.com/MagicStack/MagicPython

In the process, we had to make a decision on how to highlight raw string
literals -- r''.  Many existing highlighters assume that all raw strings
are regexps, and highlight them as such, i.e. '\s' and '\n' will be
highlighted.

I think that it might be a good idea to state the following in PEP 8:

- use r'...' strings for raw strings that describe regular expressions;
these strings might be highlighted specially in some editors.

- use R'...' strings for raw strings; editors *should not* highlight
any escaped characters in them.

What do you think?

Yury