Executing the following code against a py file which contains line continuations generates an assert:
import tokenize
foofile = open(filename, "r")
tokenize.untokenize(list(tokenize.generate_tokens(foofile.readline)))

(note, the list() is important due to issue #8478)

The assert triggered is:
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
  File "C:\Python27\lib\tokenize.py", line 262, in untokenize
    return ut.untokenize(iterable)
  File "C:\Python27\lib\tokenize.py", line 198, in untokenize
    self.add_whitespace(start)
  File "C:\Python27\lib\tokenize.py", line 187, in add_whitespace
    assert row <= self.prev_row
AssertionError

I have tested this in 2.6.5, 2.7 and 3.1.2.  The line numbers may differ but the stack is otherwise identical between these versions.

Example input code:
foo = \
   3

If the assert is removed, the code generated is still incorrect.  For example, the input:
foo = 3
if foo == 5 or \
   foo == 1
    pass

becomes:
foo = 3
if foo == 5 orfoo == 1
    pass

which besides not having the line continuation, is functionally incorrect.

I'm wrapping my head around the functionality of this module and am willing to do the legwork to get a fix in.  Ideas on how to go about it are more than welcome.

Ironic aside:  this bug is present when tokenize.py itself is used as input.

No idea if I'm getting the patch format right here, but tally ho!

This is keyed from release27-maint

Index: Lib/tokenize.py
===================================================================
--- Lib/tokenize.py	(revision 85136)
+++ Lib/tokenize.py	(working copy)
@@ -184,8 +184,13 @@
 
     def add_whitespace(self, start):
         row, col = start
-        assert row <= self.prev_row
         col_offset = col - self.prev_col
+        # Nearly all newlines are handled by the NL and NEWLINE tokens,
+        # but explicit line continuations are not, so they're handled here.
+        if row > self.prev_row:  
+            row_offset = row - self.prev_row
+            self.tokens.append("\\\n" * row_offset)
+            col_offset = col  # Recalculate the column offset from the start of our new line
         if col_offset:
             self.tokens.append(" " * col_offset)

Two issues remain with this fix, both of which replace the assert with something functional but not exactly what the original text is:
1)  Whitespace leading up to a line continuation is not recreated.  The information required to do this is not present in the tokenized data.
2)  If EOF happens at the end of a line, the untokenized version will have a line continuation on the end, as the ENDMARKER token is represented on a line which does not exist in the original.

I spent some time trying to get a unit test written that demonstrates the original bug, but it would seem that doctest (which test_tokenize uses) cannot represent a '\' character properly.  The existing unit tests involving line continuations pass due to the '\' characters being interpreted as ERRORTOKEN, which is not as they're done when read from file or interactive prompt.

Interesting, is that a separate defect of doctest?

--------------------------
import StringIO
import tokenize

tokens = []
def fnord(*a):
    tokens.append(a)

tokenize.tokenize(StringIO.StringIO("a = 1").readline, fnord)

tokenize.untokenize(tokens)
----------------------------------

Generates the same assertion failure, for what it's worth.  No line continuation needed.

This does not happen in 2.5 on my machine.

Additionally, substituting "a=1\n" for "a=1" results in no assertion and successful "untokenizing" to "a = 1\n"

Yup, that's related to ENDMARKER being tokenized to its own line, even if EOF happens at the end of the last line of actual code.  I don't know if anything relies on that behavior so I can't really suggest changing it.

My patch handles the described situation, albeit a bit poorly as I mentioned in comment 2.

> My patch handles the described situation, albeit a bit poorly ...

Let us know when you've got a cleaned-up patch and have run the round-trip tests on a broad selection of files.

For your test case, don't feel compelled to use doctest.  It's okay to write a regular unittest and add that to the test suite.

I looked at this a bit and made a revised version of the patch that doesn't add any line continuations when the token is ENDMARKER.  It works on the example program and a few variations I tried, though I'm not convinced that it'll work for all possible permutations of line continuations, whitespace, and ENDMARKER.  (I couldn't find one that failed, though.)

Is this worth pursuing?  I could put together the necessary test cases.

@amk: I'd appreciate it if you did. :)

I ran into this bug while writing some code that converts b"..." into "..." in PyCrypto's setup.py script (for backward compatibility with Python 2.5 and below).

One could argue that "The guarantee applies only to the token type and token string as the spacing between tokens (column positions) may change." covers merging of lines, but total elimination of needed whitespace is definitely a bug.

The \ continuation bug is one of many covered by #12691 and its patch, but this came first and it focused on only this bug. With respect to this issue, the code patches are basically the same; I will use tests to choose between them.

On #12691, Gareth notes that the 5-tuple mode that uses add-whitespace is under tested, so care is needed to not break working uses.

Adding a new parameter to a function is a new feature. I will check on pydev that no one objects to calling Untokenizer a private implementation detail.

New changeset 0f0e9b7d4f1d by Terry Jan Reedy in branch '2.7':
Issue #9974: When untokenizing, use row info to insert backslash+newline.
http://hg.python.org/cpython/rev/0f0e9b7d4f1d

New changeset 24b4cd5695d9 by Terry Jan Reedy in branch '3.3':
Issue #9974: When untokenizing, use row info to insert backslash+newline.
http://hg.python.org/cpython/rev/24b4cd5695d9

I added 5-tuple mode to roundtrip() in #20750. I solved the ENDMARKER problem by breaking out of the token loop if and when it appears. Reconstructing trailing whitespace other than \n is hopeless. The roundtrip test currently only tests equality of token sequences. But my own tests show that code with backslash-newline is reconstructed correctly as long as there is no space before it and something other than ENDMARKER after it.

I discovered that tokenize will tokenize '\\' but not '\\\n'. So the latter will never appear as tokenizer output. Even if we did use ENDMARKER to create the latter, it would fail the current roundtrip test.