I have a misunderstanding of the use of r in print function to remove escape characters. Very basic example of what is not working for me below and one of several efforts I have made to remedy the situation:
print(r"I am trying to keep the backslash in the link using r \www.home.com\")
SyntaxError: unterminated string literal (detected at line 19)
This is the error that is presented to me when I try to print to console. I have attempted different ways to end the string literal. Can someone help me to understand what is happening here and the logic.
I have attempted various fixes like:
print("\\www.home.com\\")
This does work, but in my head using r before the "" should work too.
Example of what works:
print(r"This string would print normally if I remove the last back slash \www.home.com")
"... I have a misunderstanding of the use of r in print function to remove escape characters. ..."
This is called a raw string.
Here are some excerpts, from the Python Documentation.
The Python Language Reference – 2.4.1. String and Bytes literals
"... Both string and bytes literals may optionally be prefixed with a letter
'r'or'R'; such strings are called raw strings and treat backslashes as literal characters. ..."
The Python Tutorial – 3.1.2. Text
"... If you don’t want characters prefaced by
\to be interpreted as special characters, you can use raw strings by adding anrbefore the first quote ...
... There is one subtle aspect to raw strings: a raw string may not end in an odd number of\characters; see the FAQ entry for more information and workarounds. ..."
The reason your code doesn't work is because Python is interpreting the escape sequence as a literal value.
The \ is essentially capturing the subsequent character.
Thus, the ending \" is considered literal.
Here is a similar question and answer.
Why can't Python's raw string literals end with a single backslash?
In this case, just use a regular string literal.
print("I am trying to keep the backslash in the link using r \www.home.com\\")