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

Ethan Furman ethan at stoneleaf.us
Tue Feb 24 19:47:10 CET 2015

On 02/24/2015 10:14 AM, Guido van Rossum wrote:

This is about messages from failing file-open operations if the filename contains an escaped character? I'd go slow there too: here are a lot of places where files are opened and messages are printed, both in the C code and in the stdlib. I'm not sure I buy the argument that just echoing the repr() of the name back doesn't help -- the escapes in there are actually useful in case a filename containing garbage chars (or even a trailing space) was read from some other source.

I can attest from my impoverished Windows programming days that looking at

--> os.listdir('c:\temp') SomeErrorMessage about syntax 'c:\temp'

is not very helpful. There is zero visual indication that the \ and the t are one character, not two. Changing that error message to:

SomeErrorMessage about syntax 'c:[\t]emp'

or

SomeErrorMessage about syntax 'c:\x07emp'

or something that shouts out, "hey! one character in this location!" would be a good thing.

-- Ethan

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