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

The reason is explained in the part of that section which I highlighted in bold:

String quotes can be escaped with a backslash, but the backslash remains in the string; for example, r"\"" is a valid string literal consisting of two characters: a backslash and a double quote; r"\" is not a valid string literal (even a raw string cannot end in an odd number of backslashes). Specifically, a raw string cannot end in a single backslash (since the backslash would escape the following quote character). Note also that a single backslash followed by a newline is interpreted as those two characters as part of the string, not as a line continuation.

So raw strings are not 100% raw, there is still some rudimentary backslash-processing.

That's the way it is! I see it as one of those small defects in python!

I don't think there's a good reason for it, but it's definitely not parsing; it's really easy to parse raw strings with \ as a last character.

The catch is, if you allow \ to be the last character in a raw string then you won't be able to put " inside a raw string. It seems python went with allowing " instead of allowing \ as the last character.

However, this shouldn't cause any trouble.

If you're worried about not being able to easily write windows folder pathes such as c:\mypath\ then worry not, for, you can represent them as r"C:\mypath", and, if you need to append a subdirectory name, don't do it with string concatenation, for it's not the right way to do it anyway! use os.path.join

>>> import os
>>> os.path.join(r"C:\mypath", "subfolder")
'C:\\mypath\\subfolder'

In order for you to end a raw string with a slash I suggest you can use this trick:

>>> print(r"c:\test"'\\')
c:\test\

It uses the implicit concatenation of string literals in Python and concatenates one string delimited with double quotes with another that is delimited by single quotes. Ugly, but works.

Another trick is to use chr(92) as it evaluates to "\".

I recently had to clean a string of backslashes and the following did the trick:

CleanString = DirtyString.replace(chr(92),'')

I realize that this does not take care of the "why" but the thread attracts many people looking for a solution to an immediate problem.