String backslash characters

[PD]

Hello,

I am new to python, but i am quite curious about the following.

suppose you had

print '\378'

which should not work because \377 is the max. then it displays two
characters (an 8 and a heart in my case...). What else does'nt quite
make sense is that if this is an octal why is an 8 accepted?

for instance is 378 really 11, 111, 1000 which is then the two
characters: <00000001>,<1111000>. And why is this accepted?

I apologize if this has been discussed or if it is obvious. I would
appreciate it if someone could clear me up.

Yours,
PD