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I want to understand why do we use a r before a path name in python such as
dirname = r'C:\temp\parts' 
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In Python strings, the backslash "\" is a special character, also called the "escape" character. It is used in representing certain whitespace characters: "\t" is a tab, "\n" is a newline, and "\r" is a carriage return.
Show activity on this post. The r means that the string is to be treated as a raw string, which means all escape codes will be ignored. For an example: '\n' will be treated as a newline character, while r'\n' will be treated as the characters \ followed by n .
R Means 'Raw String' An 'r' before a string tells the Python interpreter to treat backslashes as a literal (raw) character. Normally, Python uses backslashes as escape characters.
String quotes can be escaped with a backslash, but the backslash remains in the string; for example, r"\"" is a valid string literal consisting of two characters: a backslash and a double quote; r"\" is not a valid string literal (even a raw string cannot end in an odd number of backslashes).
r means the string will be treated as raw string.
See the official Python 2 Reference about "String literals":
When an
'r'or'R'prefix is present, a character following a backslash is included in the string without change, and all backslashes are left in the string. For example, the string literalr"\n"consists of two characters: a backslash and a lowercase'n'. String quotes can be escaped with a backslash, but the backslash remains in the string; for example,r"\""is a valid string literal consisting of two characters: a backslash and a double quote;r"\"is not a valid string literal (even a raw string cannot end in an odd number of backslashes). Specifically, a raw string cannot end in a single backslash (since the backslash would escape the following quote character). Note also that a single backslash followed by a newline is interpreted as those two characters as part of the string, not as a line continuation.
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