Beginning Python - From Novice to Professional

28 CHAPTER 1 ■ INSTANT HACKING: THE BASICS
>>> path = 'C:\nowhere'
>>> path
'C:\nowhere'
This looks correct, until you print it and discover the flaw:
>>> print path
C:
owhere
Not exactly what we were after, is it? So what do we do? We can escape the backslash itself:
>>> print 'C:\\nowhere'
C:\nowhere
This is just fine. But for long paths, you wind up with a lot of backslashes:
path = 'C:\\Program Files\\fnord\\foo\\bar\\baz\\frozz\\bozz'
Raw strings are useful in such cases. They don’t treat the backslash as a special character
at all. Every character you put into a raw string stays the way you wrote it:
>>> print r'C:\nowhere'
C:\nowhere
>>> print r'C:\Program Files\fnord\foo\bar\baz\frozz\bozz'
C:\Program Files\fnord\foo\bar\baz\frozz\bozz
As you can see, raw strings are written with an r in front. It would seem that you can put almost
anything inside a raw string, and that is almost true. Of course, quotes have to be escaped as
usual, although that means that you get a backslash in your final string, too:
>>> print r'Let\'s go!'
Let\'s go!
The one thing you can’t have in a raw string is a final backslash. In other words, the last
character in a raw string cannot be a backslash. Given the previous example, that ought to be
obvious. If the last character (before the final quote) is a backslash, Python won’t know whether
to end the string or not:
>>> print r"This is illegal\"
SyntaxError: invalid token
Okay, so it’s reasonable, but what if you want the last character in your raw string to be a
backslash? (Perhaps it’s the end of a DOS path, for example.) Well, I’ve given you a whole bag
of tricks in this section that should help you solve that problem, but basically you need to put
the backslash in a separate string. A simple way of doing that is the following:
>>> print r'C:\Program Files\foo\bar' '\\'
C:\Program Files\foo\bar\
Note that you can use both single and double quotes with raw strings. Even triple-quoted
strings can be raw.