escaping/encoding/formatting in python

[rusi]

On Apr 6, 10:13 am, Steve Howell <showel... at yahoo.com> wrote:
> On Apr 5, 9:59 pm,rusi<rustompm... at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > On Apr 6, 6:56 am,SteveHowell<showel... at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> > > One of the biggest nuisances for programmers, just beneath date/time
> > > APIs in the pantheon of annoyances, is that we are constantly dealing
> > > with escaping/encoding/formatting issues.
>
> > [OT for this list]
> > If you run
> > $ find /usr/share/emacs/23.3/lisp/ -name '*.gz'|xargs zgrep '\\\\\\\\\\
> > \\\\\\'
> > you can get quite a few results.
>
> > [Suitable assumptions: linux box with emacs installed]
>
> You've one-upped me with 2-to-the-N backslash escaping.  I've written
> useful scripts before with "\\\\\\\\" (scripts that went through
> three
> levels of interpretation), but four is setting a new bar.  My use of
> three exponentially increasing levels of backslashes back in the day
> was like Beamon's jump in the Mexico City Olympics.  An amazing feat
> for its time, but every record
> eventually gets broken.  Well done.


On a (somewhat distantly) related note, found this old fortune:

Wouldn't the sentence 'I want to put a hyphen between the words Fish
and And and And and Chips in my Fish-And-Chips sign' have been clearer
if quotation marks had been placed before Fish, and between Fish and
and, and and and And, and And and and, and and and And, and And and
and, and and and Chips, as well as after Chips?