[Edit Error: 'utf8' codec can't decode byte 0xe2 in position 212: invalid continuation byte]


Re-reading the suggested description, it struck me that for encoding, this is redundant with the “backslashreplace” error handler:

>>> test = "".join(map(chr, range(sys.maxunicode + 1)))
>>> test.encode("raw-unicode-escape") == test.encode("latin-1", "backslashreplace")
True

However, decoding also seems similar to “unicode_escape”, except that only \uXXXX and \UXXXXXXXX seem to be supported.

Maybe there should be a warning that backslashes are not escaped:

>>> "\\u005C".encode("raw-unicode-escape").decode("raw-unicode-escape")
'\\'