python version 3.4 does not support a 'ur' prefix

Question

I have some python code writen in an older version of python(2.x) and I struggle to make it work. I\'m using python 3.4

_eng_word = ur\"[a-zA-Z][a-zA-Z0-9\'.]*\         


        

Answer 1

This table compares (some of) the different string literal prefixes in Python 2(.7) and 3(.4+):

As you can see, in Python 3 there's no way to have a literal that doesn't process escapes, but does process unicode literals. To get such a string with code that works in both Python 2 and 3, use:

br"[a-zA-Z][a-zA-Z0-9'.]*".decode('raw_unicode_escape')

Actually, your example is not very good, since it doesn't have any unicode literals, or escape sequences. A better example would be:

br"[\u03b1-\u03c9\u0391-\u03a9][\t'.]*".decode('raw_unicode_escape')

In python 2:

>>> br"[\u03b1-\u03c9\u0391-\u03a9][\t'.]*".decode('raw_unicode_escape')
u"[\u03b1-\u03c9\u0391-\u03a9][\\t'.]*"

In Python 3:

>>> br"[\u03b1-\u03c9\u0391-\u03a9][\t'.]*".decode('raw_unicode_escape')
"[α-ωΑ-Ω][\\t'.]*"

Which is really the same thing.