homepage

PEP 414 proposes restoring the "u" string prefix (semantically as a "noop") to make porting from Python2 easier. I would like to propose that "ru"-strings also interpret embedded "\uxxxx" unicode literals in the python2 fashion (as a single unicode character) rather than in the python 3.2 fashion (as 6 characters).
Many Python2 programs use unicode literals in strings because they can be represented and displayed in source code with the ascii character set. For example, I often write ur" \u3000\u3042\t" rather than ur" あ " because the former is much clearer in source code than the latter and does not require the viewer to have a Japanese font installed.
However such a string must be manually converted for Python3 because the former string has a very different meaning in Python3 than Python2. The equivalent in Python3 is " \u3000\u3042\\t". AFAIK, 2to3 does not fix this. Because there are no longer unicode literals in Python3 raw strings, any string with a unicode literal *has* to be a non-raw string (AFAICT). This means that strings used as regexes, that have a lot of backslashes and have unicode literals, must have the backslashes doubled. Doubling the backslashes in the above example is trivial but it is not trival in more realistic regexes. This was one of the main reasons for having raw strings in Python2 I thought. It is unfortunate that one looses this ability (in the presence of unicode literals) in Python3.
When I raised this issue on the Python user's list [*1], Terry Reedy made the suggestion that since the "u" string prefix was being reintroduced for python 3.3, that having the prefix also restore the python2 unicode literal handling would not introduce any incompatibilties and would greatly increase the ease of porting to Python3 for some programs.[*2] He subsequently raised the issue on the dev list.[*3]
An argument might be made that this is an extra feature that would encourage the use of the "u"-prefix beyond that of easing porting from Python2. Perhaps so but there is currently a hole in Python's capability that is difficult to work around, and I've seen no other proposals to fix it. So it seems to me that the benefits of this proposal greatly outweigh that somewhat purist argument.
----
[*1] http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-list/2012-May/1292870.html
[*2] http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-list/2012-May/1292887.html
[*3] http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2012-May/119760.html 

See issue3665.

See also
http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-list/2012-June/625406.html 

Given the resolution of #15096, ISTM this will be a "wontfix", though I'll stop short of marking it as such myself.

Should it be closed?

As of #15096 I've closed this bug as "won't fix".