What does a leading `x` mean in a Python string `xaa`
Question:
What is difference between 'aa'
and 'xaa'
? What does the x
part mean? And which chapter of the Python documentation covers this topic?
Answers:
That’s unicode character escaping. See “Unicode Constructors” on PEP 100
The leading x
escape sequence means the next two characters are interpreted as hex digits for the character code, so xaa
equals chr(0xaa)
, i.e., chr(16 * 10 + 10)
— a small raised lowercase 'a'
character.
Escape sequences are documented in a short table here in the Python docs.
What is difference between 'aa'
and 'xaa'
? What does the x
part mean? And which chapter of the Python documentation covers this topic?
That’s unicode character escaping. See “Unicode Constructors” on PEP 100
The leading x
escape sequence means the next two characters are interpreted as hex digits for the character code, so xaa
equals chr(0xaa)
, i.e., chr(16 * 10 + 10)
— a small raised lowercase 'a'
character.
Escape sequences are documented in a short table here in the Python docs.