backslash plague

[Alex Martelli]

Luis P. Mendes <luisXX_lupe2XX at netvisaoXX.pt> wrote:

> So, the trick is to put the r in front of the string?!

If you want a literal string with backslashes in it, you either double
each backslash or use a rawliteral (r in front).

> y='R0\1.2646\1.2649\D'

the third character of y, \1, is in this case the byte with value 1 in
the ASCII code, etc.  Apparently that's not what you want.

But is this string going to be a literal in your code, rather than, say,
read from a file?  Sounds unlikely.  When you read from a file there's
no escape-sequence interpretation, so the issue of how to write
literals, raw or otherwise, is irrelevant there.


Alex