[Python-Dev] Emit SyntaxWarning on unrecognized backslash escapes? (original) (raw)

Nick Coghlan ncoghlan at gmail.com
Mon Feb 23 23:40:01 CET 2015

On 24 February 2015 at 07:39, Mark Lawrence <breamoreboy at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:

On 23/02/2015 21:27, Serhiy Storchaka wrote:

On 23.02.15 21:58, Joao S. O. Bueno wrote:

That happens all the time, and is this use case that should possibly be addressed here - maybe something as simple as adding a couple of paragraphs to different places in the documentation could mitigate the issue. (in contrast to make a tons of otherwise valid code to become deprecated in a couple releases). The problem is that the user don't know that he should read the documentation. It just find that his script works with "C:\sample.txt", but doesn't work with "D:\test.txt". He has no ideas what happen. Isn't this why users have help desks?

Most don't, and cases like "\n" or "\t" in a Windows path name being converted to whitespace are utterly impossible to look up in an internet search when they fail, so a user learning on their own gets left with a broken program and no particularly effective ways to ask for help figuring it out.

Like Unicode encoding errors they may appear a long way from the source of the offending data value (in this case, likely to be a file name copy and pasted from elsewhere on their system), and they don't give a particularly helpful error message (especially when the escape sequences are for whitespace).

While I originally disliked the idea, I think this is a genuine usability issue on Windows that would be worth addressing. However, it's a significant enough change that I believe it needs a PEP and a reasonably long transition period before anything actually breaks. For example:

Regards, Nick.

-- Nick Coghlan | ncoghlan at gmail.com | Brisbane, Australia

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