I found this line in some Python code, but I can’t seem to understand what it means. The purpose of the script is to count the amount of lines of code from STDIN. The args.comment is the comment identifier that you give (so it won’t count these lines). Can someone explain what this regex will match?
>Solution :
That is a formatted string literal, introduced in Python 3.6. Backslashes need to be escaped in strings because otherwise they are interpreted as an escape sequence (e.g., \n, \t).
The author could have instead used a formatted raw string (fr'...'), like this:
fr'^\s*{args.comment}'
In a raw string, backslash has no special meaning, so it can be used verbatim.