On 2007-05-11 00:11, Guido van Rossum wrote: > On 5/10/07, M.-A. Lemburg <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> On 2007-05-10 20:53, Paul Moore wrote: >>> On 10/05/07, Guido van Rossum <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >>>> I just discovered that, in all versions of Python as far back as I >>>> have access to (2.0), \uXXXX escapes are interpreted inside raw >>>> unicode strings. Thus: >>> [...] >>>> Does anyone remember why it is done this way? The reference manual >>>> describes this behavior, but doesn't give an explanation: >>> My memory is so dim as to be more speculation than anything else, but >>> I suspect it's simply because there's no other way of including >>> characters outside the ASCII range in a raw string. >> This is per design (see PEP 100) and was done for the reason given >> by Paul. The motivation for the chosen approach was to make Python's >> raw Unicode strings compatible to Java's raw Unicode strings: >> >> http://java.sun.com/docs/books/jls/second_edition/html/lexical.doc.html > > I'm not sure what Java compatibility buys us. It is also far from > perfect -- IIUC, in Java if you write \u0022 (that's the " character) > it counts as an opening or closing quote, and if you write \u005c (a > backslash) it can be used to escape the following character. OTOH, in > Python, you can write ur"C:\Program Files\u005c" and voila, a raw > string terminating in a backslash. (In Java this would escape the " > instead.)
http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/1999-November/001346.html http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/1999-November/001392.html and all the other postings in that month related to this. > However, I understand the other reason (inclusion of non-ASCII > characters in raw strings) and I reluctantly agree with it. > Reluctantly, because it means I can't create a raw string containing a > \ followed by u or U -- I needed one of those today. >>> print ur"\u005cu" \u -- Marc-Andre Lemburg eGenix.com Professional Python Services directly from the Source (#1, May 11 2007) >>> Python/Zope Consulting and Support ... http://www.egenix.com/ >>> mxODBC.Zope.Database.Adapter ... http://zope.egenix.com/ >>> mxODBC, mxDateTime, mxTextTools ... http://python.egenix.com/ ________________________________________________________________________ :::: Try mxODBC.Zope.DA for Windows,Linux,Solaris,MacOSX for free ! :::: eGenix.com Software, Skills and Services GmbH Pastor-Loeh-Str.48 D-40764 Langenfeld, Germany. CEO Dipl.-Math. Marc-Andre Lemburg Registered at Amtsgericht Duesseldorf: HRB 46611 _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
