Message 65599 - Python tracker (original) (raw)

It seems that escape is pretty dumb. The documentations says that re.escape escapes all non-alphanumeric characters, and it does that faithfully. It would seem more useful to have a list of meta-characters and just escape those. This is more true in Py3k when str can have thousands of possible characters that could be considered alphanumeric.

The usual convention is to escape everything that is ASCII and not A-Za-z0-9_, in case other punctuation becomes special in the future. But I agree -- escaping just the actual special characters makes the most sense.

Russ