[Newbie] Is the text delimiter changeable?

[John La Rooy]

On Sun, 30 Jun 2002 15:49:16 GMT
baf at texas.net (Ben Fairbank) wrote:

> I have to process large amounts of text and the text includes numerous
> apostrophes and quotation marks.  It would be very handy if I could
> temporarily assign a substitute for Python's use of the caracters "
> and ' to delimit text strings.  If I could use, for example, the @
> character or the # character, neither of which appears in the text I
> have to work with, and if I could disable the " and ' delimiters, then
> my task would be greatly simplified.  I realize I can backslash escape
> these characters in some circumstances, but I do not think that will
> work when a user's input is a word such as "can't" or "don't."
> Anyway, short of doing something truly drastic, such as recompiling
> the system (which I have no intention of doing), is there a workaround
> that will permit this?
> 
> Thank you,
> 
> BAF

You don't say where is the text coming from. The quotes aren't used as
delimiters except when you are working with source. 

for instance if you have a line like this in your script
s="can't"


if you are using
s=rawinput()
or
s=some_file.read()

the quote don't have any special meaning at all


just wondering as you referred to the "user's input" it doesn't sound
like the user is writing python code


John