doctest bug?

[Tim Peters]

[Edward K. Ream]
> Arggh.  I failed to find the following from the docs the first time around:
> 
> "If you continue a line via backslashing in an interactive session, or for
> any other reason use a backslash, you need to double the backslash in the
> docstring version."

Note that "the rules" here follow inescapably from the mechanics of
how doctests are written:  first Python processes escapes as part of
compiling the file containing doctests, and then doctest later sends
the strings thru compile(), which processes escapes again.

A sometimes (very) useful alternative is to put doctests in
triple-quoted r-strings.  Then Python leaves all the backslashes alone
when compiling the file.  If you have a lot of backslashes in
doctests, that can make life a lot easier.