[Python-Dev] \u and \U escapes in raw unicode string literals (original) (raw)

"Martin v. Löwis" martin at v.loewis.de
Fri May 11 07:52:39 CEST 2007

This is what prompted my question, actually: in Py3k, in the str/unicode unification branch, r"\u1234" changes meaning: before the unification, this was an 8-bit string, where the \u was not special, but now it is a unicode string, where \u is special.

That is true for non-raw strings also: the meaning of "\u1234" also changes.

However, traditionally, there was no escaping mechanism in raw strings in Python, and I feel that this is a good principle, because it is easy to learn (if you leave out the detail that \ can't be the last character in a raw string - which should get fixed also, IMO). So I think in Py3k, "\u1234" should continue to be a string with 6 characters. Otherwise, people will complain that os.stat(r"c:\windows\system32\user32.dll") fails. Telling them to write os.stat(r"c:\windows\system32\u005Cuser32.dll") will just cause puzzled faces.

Windows path names are one of the two primary applications of raw strings (the other being regexes).

Regards, Martin

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