[Python-Dev] Why aren't escape sequences in literal strings handled by the tokenizer? (original) (raw)

Eric V. Smith eric at trueblade.com
Thu May 17 18:38:59 EDT 2018

On 5/17/2018 3:01 PM, Larry Hastings wrote:

I fed this into tokenize.tokenize(): b''' x = "\u1234" ''' I was a bit surprised to see \Uxxxx in the output.  Particularly because the output (t.string) was a string and not bytes.

For those (like me) who have no idea how to use tokenize.tokenize's wacky interface, the test code is:

list(tokenize.tokenize(io.BytesIO(b''' x = "\u1234" ''').readline))

Maybe I'm making a parade of my ignorance, but I assumed that string literals were parsed by the parser--just like everything else is parsed by the parser, hey it seems like a good place for it--and in particular that the escape sequence substitutions would be done in the tokenizer. Having stared at it a little, I now detect a whiff of "this design solved a real problem".  So... what was the problem, and how does this design solve it?

I assume the intent is to not throw away any information in the lexer, and give the parser full access to the original string. But that's just a guess.

BTW, my use case is that I hoped to use CPython's tokenizer to parse some Python-ish-looking text and handle double-quoted strings for me. Especially all the escape sequences--leveraging all CPython's support for funny things like \U{penguin}.  The current behavior of the tokenizer makes me think it'd be easier to roll my own!

Can you feed the token text to the ast?

ast.literal_eval('"\u1234"') 'ሴ'

Eric

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