Hello!

I got a report that the character "\" was removed from a string using the following code

> "\\server\path\to".strip(r'"\'<>') 

At first insight, looks like a bug, because I don't expect the use of the escape character at all. Then I noticed, that our mistake there is that the "strip" argument should be a "string" not a REGEXP.

Kinda weird to read, and I've no idea if this is expected behaviour in Python, as I'm relatively very new. So just informing, 

Kind regards, 

-- 
Tito

The argument isn't a regex, it's a raw string literal consisting of the characters " (quote), \ (backslash), ' (apostrophe), < (less than) and > (greater than).

In addition, you probably want "\\server\path\to" to be a raw string, too. That way, the backslashes are not given special meaning. Notice the difference in output between these two:

>>> "\\server\path\to".strip(r'"\'<>') 
'server\\path\to'
>>> r"\\server\path\to".strip(r'"\'<>') 
'server\\path\\to'

In the first one, '\t' is being treated as a tab character, in the second one you see a backslash followed by a 't'.

My rule of thumb is: any time you have a string with a filename containing backslashes, you want it to be a raw string.

Thanks guys for the information! Is still weird to me that the escape character is used, but well !  Will remember this bug. 
Kind regards,