String backslash characters

[Dan Bishop]

PD wrote:
> 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?

Because 8 isn't an octal digit, so it's not part of the escape
sequence, but a separate character.  It's just like

print 'This string\47s escape sequence does not include the s.'

Your example displays two characters because it is two characters:
'\037' and '8'.