On 2013-09-03 02:06, Steven D'Aprano wrote: >> So the real bug is with the parser. > > It is likely that nobody noticed this bug in the first place > because the current behaviour doesn't matter for regexes, which is > the primary purpose of raw strings. You can't end a regex with an > unescaped backslash, so r'abc\'' is an illegal regex and it doesn't > matter if you can't create it.
I'd contend that the two primary purposes of raw strings (this is starting to sound like a Spanish Inquisition sketch) are regexes and DOS/Win32 file path literals. And I hit this trailing-backslash case all the time, as Vim's path-completion defaults to putting the trailing backslash at the end. So I might be entering a literal like r"c:\win and hit <tab> which expands to r"c:\Windows\ for which I then need to both remove the backslash and close the quote. If Python's parser just blithely ignored terminal backslashes, I could just close the quote and get on with my day. -tkc -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list