[Python-Dev] Omission in re.sub? (original) (raw)

Guido van Rossum guido at python.org
Sun Dec 11 21:27:35 CET 2011

As long as there's a way to place a single backslash in the output this seems fine to me, though I'm not sure it's important. Of course it will likely break some test... the test will then have to be fixed.

I can't remember why we did this -- is there a full list of all the escapes that re.sub() interprets somewhere? I thought it was pretty limited. Maybe it's the related list of escapes that are supported in regular expressions?

--Guido

On Sun, Dec 11, 2011 at 12:12 PM, MRAB <python at mrabarnett.plus.com> wrote:

I've just come across an omission in re.sub which I hadn't noticed before.

In re.sub the replacement string can contain escape sequences, for example:

repr(re.sub(r"x", r"\n", "axb")) "'a\nb'" However: repr(re.sub(r"x", r"\x0A", "axb")) "'a\\x0Ab'" Yes, it doesn't recognise "\xNN". Is there a reason for this? The regex module does the same, but is there any objection to me fixing it in the regex module? (I'm thinking about compatibility with re here.)

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-- --Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido)

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