[Python-Dev] Go \x yourself (original) (raw)

Guido van Rossum guido@beopen.com
Fri, 04 Aug 2000 10:11:03 -0500

I'm quite certain that this should be a SyntaxError, not a ValueError:

>>> "\x1" SyntaxError: two hex digits are required after \x >>> "\x\x" SyntaxError: two hex digits are required after \x Otherwise, +1. Sounds great.

No, problems with literal interpretations traditionally raise "runtime" exceptions rather than syntax errors. E.g.

111111111111111111111111111111111111 OverflowError: integer literal too large u'\u123' UnicodeError: Unicode-Escape decoding error: truncated \uXXXX

Note that UnicodeError is a subclass of ValueError.

--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.pythonlabs.com/~guido/)