Raw string substitution problem

Gregory Ewing greg.ewing at canterbury.ac.nz
Fri Dec 18 02:51:56 EST 2009


MRAB wrote:

> Regular expressions and replacement strings have their own escaping
> mechanism, which also uses backslashes.

This seems like a misfeature to me. It makes sense for
a regular expression to give special meanings to backslash
sequences, because it's a sublanguage with its own syntax.
But I can't see any earthly reason to do that with the
*replacement* string, which is just data.

It looks like a feature that's been blindly copied over
from Perl without thinking about whether it makes sense
in Python.

-- 
Greg



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