On Mon, Dec 26, 2011 at 12:04 PM, Felipe O <pip....@gmail.com> wrote: > Hi all, > Whenever I take any input (raw_input, of course!) or I read from a > file, etc., any backslashes get escaped automatically. Is there any > elegant way of parsing the backslashes as though they were written in > a python string... I guess the alternative is to make a dictionary of all the > escapes I > want to support, but that sounds tedious and error-prone.
The question really is: Are you looking to support some backslash escapes, or are you looking to imitate Python? If the former, I recommend making a specific list of what you support; every language has its own, usually including some obscurities, and if all you need is a few basics like \n, \t, \\, etc, then you probably don't want to support \123 and \u1234 notations for arbitrary insertion of characters. But if you actually want to imitate a Python string literal, eval is almost certainly the easiest way; and if you want a safer version: http://docs.python.org/library/ast.html#ast.literal_eval I'm not sure how well suited this is for parsing a string for its escapes, but if you're looking to imitate Python, it may be easier to tell people that the value must be enclosed in quotes - thus making it an expression. ChrisA -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
