> We'll need a patch that implements single and double quote escaping 
> for unicode_escape and a \uXXXX style escaping of quotes for the 
> raw_unicode_escape encoder.

OK, I'll remove unicode_escape_single_quotes.patch and update unicode_escape_reorg.patch.

> Other changes are not necessary.

Would you please clarify?  There are a few other (minor) bugs that were discovered while writing unicode_escape_reorg.patch that I think should be fixed:
  * the UTF-16 surrogate pair decoding logic could read past the end of the provided Py_UNICODE character array if the last character is between 0xD800 and 0xDC00
  * _PyString_Resize() will be called on an empty string if the size argument of unicodeescape_string() is 0.  This will raise a SystemError because _PyString_Resize() can only be called if the object's ref count is 1 (even if no resizing is to take place) yet PyString_FromStringAndSize() returns a shared empty string instance if size is 0.
  * it is unclear what unicodeescape_string() should do if size < 0

Beyond those issues, I'm worried about manageability stemming from the amount of code duplication.  If a bug is found in one of those encoding functions, the other two will likely need updating.

> The pickle copy of the codec can be left untouched (both cPickle.c 
> and pickle.py) - it doesn't matter whether quotes are escaped or not 
> in the pickle data stream.

Unfortunately, pickle.py must be modified because it does its own backslash escaping before encoding with the raw_unicode_escape codec.  This means that backslashes would become double escaped and the decoded value would differ (confirmed by running the pickle unit tests).

The (minor) bugs in PyUnicode_EncodeRawUnicodeEscape() are also present in cPickle.c, so they should probably be fixed as well.

> The codecs' encode direction is not defined anywhere in the 
> documentation, AFAIK, and basically an implementation detail.

I read the escape codec documentation (see the original post) as implying that the encoders can generate eval-able string literals.  I'll add some clarifying statements.

Thanks for the feedback!