Why can't Python's raw string literals end with a single backslash?

Question

Technically, any odd number of backslashes, as described in the documentation.

>>> r\'\\\'
  File \"\", line 1
    r\'\\\'
       ^
Syn         


        

Answer 1

Comming from C it pretty clear to me that a single \ works as escape character allowing you to put special characters such as newlines, tabs and quotes into strings.

That does indeed disallow \ as last character since it will escape the " and make the parser choke. But as pointed out earlier \ is legal.