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

Chris Angelico rosuav at gmail.com
Tue Feb 24 00:53:11 CET 2015

On Tue, Feb 24, 2015 at 9:40 AM, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com> wrote:

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).

And on the subject of Unicode errors, imagine a path name of "C:\Users\YourName\Desktop\FileName.txt". Under Python 2, that'll work fine; under Python 3, it'll fail with an error that, in all probability, will be interpreted as "Unicode is hard :(" rather than "loose backslash escapes are a problem".

ChrisA

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