> yes, i suppose you are right. i can't think of a reason i would NEED a
> raw string in this situation.
It looks from your code that you are trying to remove all occurances of
one string from the other. a simple regex way would be to use re.sub()
>>> import re
>>> a = "abc"
>>> b = "debcabbde"
>>> re.sub("[" + a + "]","",b)
'dede'