[doc] Slight error in words in [ 2.4.1. String and Bytes literals ]

[MagnienSebastien]

BPO	35962
Nosy	@ncoghlan, @lisroach, @remilapeyre

^{Note: these values reflect the state of the issue at the time it was migrated and might not reflect the current state.}

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GitHub fields:

assignee = None
closed_at = None
created_at = <Date 2019-02-11.10:12:39.566>
labels = ['easy', '3.9', '3.10', '3.11', 'type-feature', 'docs']
title = '[doc] Slight error in words in [ 2.4.1. String and Bytes literals ]'
updated_at = <Date 2022-04-08.15:59:25.099>
user = 'https://bugs.python.org/MagnienSebastien'

bugs.python.org fields:

activity = <Date 2022-04-08.15:59:25.099>
actor = 'iritkatriel'
assignee = 'docs@python'
closed = False
closed_date = None
closer = None
components = ['Documentation']
creation = <Date 2019-02-11.10:12:39.566>
creator = 'Magnien Sebastien'
dependencies = []
files = []
hgrepos = []
issue_num = 35962
keywords = ['easy']
message_count = 7.0
messages = ['335205', '335493', '335526', '335529', '335530', '335532', '335706']
nosy_count = 6.0
nosy_names = ['ncoghlan', 'SilentGhost', 'docs@python', 'lisroach', 'remi.lapeyre', 'Magnien Sebastien']
pr_nums = []
priority = 'low'
resolution = None
stage = None
status = 'open'
superseder = None
type = 'enhancement'
url = 'https://bugs.python.org/issue35962'
versions = ['Python 3.9', 'Python 3.10', 'Python 3.11']

[MagnienSebastien]

The documentation reads :

" The backslash (\) character is used to escape characters that otherwise have a special meaning, such as newline, backslash itself, or the quote character. "

However, 'n' does not "otherwise have a special meaning", nor does it represent a new line.

The backslash character does in fact do two different things :

1. It removes special meanings from characters that have one (\\).
2. It assigns a special meaning to normal characters (\n).

A better description would therefore be :

" The backslash (\) character is used to either escape characters that have a special meaning, such as backslash itself, or the quote character - or give special meaning to characters that do not have one, such as 'n', whose escapment '\n' means 'newline'. "

[lisroach]

The updated line sounds good to me, please make a PR.

[MagnienSebastien]

I'm all up for it; however I only ever worked on small solo projects. I don't really know where to start. Must I clone the whole python repo, or is there maybe a doc repo?

[remilapeyre]

Hi Magnien, if you have already used Git, everything should be familiar.

You have to clone the whole project, but the documentation leaves in the Doc folder. There is a lot of information that you can get at https://devguide.python.org/documenting/

If you get lost, please open the PR and tag me in the discussion, I will try and help you.

[remilapeyre]

You will find the line you want to change in [Doc/reference/lexical_analysis.rst](https://github.com/python/cpython/blob/main/Doc/reference/lexical_analysis.rst)

[SilentGhost]

I don't think that's what the sentence say at all. It says, that a backslash can be used to escape a newline character (not "n"). This refers only to triple-quoted literals and is described in the first row of the table of escape sequences below.

[ncoghlan]

I agree the current text is ambiguous given how often folks refer to the newline escape sequence as a "newline", but it isn't wrong - it's just talking about escaping literal newlines in your source code like:

>>> "This is a \
... single-line string"
'This is a single-line string'

When this paragraph is being updated, it would be good to add a cross-reference down to the table of escape sequences later in the section.

[hauntsaninja]

Thanks, seems like the improvements have been made here