[Python-ideas] PEP 8: raw strings & regular expressions

[Yury Selivanov]

On 2015-10-22 6:14 AM, Serhiy Storchaka wrote:
> On 22.10.15 05:24, Yury Selivanov wrote:
>> I was a little bit frustrated that Sublime Text and Atom didn't support
>> all Python 3 features (mainly annotations & async/await syntax), so I
>> decided to write a new highlighter:
>>
>>      https://github.com/MagicStack/MagicPython
>>
>> In the process, we had to make a decision on how to highlight raw string
>> literals -- r''.  Many existing highlighters assume that all raw strings
>> are regexps, and highlight them as such, i.e. '\s' and '\n' will be
>> highlighted.
>>
>> I think that it might be a good idea to state the following in PEP 8:
>>
>> - use r'...' strings for raw strings that describe regular expressions;
>> these strings might be highlighted specially in some editors.
>>
>> - use R'...' strings for raw strings; editors *should not* highlight
>> any escaped characters in them.
>>
>> What do you think?
>
> Do highlighters highlight formatting strings ("%*.2f" or 
> "{0.addr:0{}x}") specially?

Many highlight old-style formatting.  Less highlight the new-style.

Github, for example, highlights both.

Yury