[Tutor] Puzzled again

[Steven D'Aprano]

Steven D'Aprano wrote:
> Richard D. Moores wrote:
>> Puzzled again. Why the error. Line 36 is the line just above "import
>> os.path". I have many other functions in mycalc.py with examples
>> formatted exactly the same way.
>>
>> def convertPath(path):
>>     """
>>     Given a path with backslashes, return that path with forward slashes.
>>
>>     By Steven D'Aprano  07/31/2011 on Tutor list
>>     >>> path = r'C:\Users\Dick\Desktop\Documents\Notes\College Notes.rtf'
> 
> Are you aware that this is not a raw string? It's wrapped inside another 
> non-raw string, so it is merely a sub-string containing the letters r 
> single-quote C colon backslash-U etc. Now, as it turns out, backslash-U 
> and friends don't have any special meanings, so it will work fine, but 


*slaps head*

Doh! No, I was wrong. \U DOES have a special meaning. It introduces an 
eight-character unicode escape sequence, but only in unicode strings.

 >>> u'\Users\Dick'
   File "<stdin>", line 1
SyntaxError: (unicode error) 'unicodeescape' codec can't decode bytes in 
position 0-2: truncated \UXXXXXXXX escape

This fails because the \U is not followed by any valid hex digits. So in 
Python 3, you should expect a different syntax error.



-- 
Steven