RFC PEP candidate: q'<delim>'quoted<delim> ?

[Terry Reedy]

"Bengt Richter" <bokr at oz.net> wrote in message
news:a6912n$jnt$0 at 216.39.172.122...
> Sorry, I wasn't making clear an unspoken condition I really had in
mind ;-)
> I think (3) does follow (2) using the added explicit condition that
the
> text quotation is to be part of the source text of a program or
module,
> and the quoted text must not need to be changed or restricted to do
it.

With the added conditions, the logic works much better.

...
> The simplest practical example is wanting to use a paste operation
> to insert arbitrary text into a program source without having to
inspect
> the text or modify it, yet be able to use it to define a string
> with the exact raw text value.

As Greg Ewing noted, you still have to scan the text with your method,
so why not scan for triple quotes - which are *extremely* rare in any
text except Python code and *quite* easy to spot (speaking for
myself).  One can always use the interpreter to check also.  Write
s='''\
<paste text here>
'''
and run or paste into interpreter.  If there is a ''' that one missed,
there will almost certainly be a SyntaxError reported, with the line
number.  One could also follow the definition of s with 'print
s[:-100]' to see if entire quotation got included in assignment.

For myself, I can hardly imagine wanting to incorparate gobs of
someone else's text into my code.  If I did, I would want to look at
it and/or isolate it in a separate module where it could be tested as
above.  I would also feel free to modify it with escape codes if
necessary.

Terry J. Reedy