\b iis a no no on windows

General Discussion
1

Hey everyone. Today I was moving things around into different files/folders and updated their file path links. When I started my game to make sure I had everything mark right, I notice a error kept poping up saying Imagear.png didn’t load up. I have no Imagear.png, but I did have a Image\bar.png. As I dove in to look at the error it said Image\x08ar.png was unable to load up… for some reason \b is returning a hex value… Anyone else get this error?

2

In Python (as in several other languages), the backslash character is a special escape character that means the next character or characters are to have special meaning. In particular, ‘\b’ is the special ASCII 8 character.

If you really want to write a backslash in Python, you have to use a double backslash, e.g. ‘Image\bar.png’. But note that Panda’s convention is to use forward slashes, not backslashes: ‘Image/bar.png’, so if you’re using any Panda call like loadModel() or loadTexture() or whatever, you should always use forward slashes. If you’re using a standard Python call like open() or something, this doesn’t apply; but you’ll find that forward slashes generally work anyway, and so it’s not a bad habit to get into.

David

3

Would it not just be wise to do it the other way? I mean… windows it self shows \ for its path ways… so / should be the special meaning you would think. Anyways…

Thanks… I thought that was the problem, but wasn’t sure. So far it’s just been with \b so it was a little werid to see that error out of no where.

4

I agree that it’s silly to use the same character as a path delimiter and as an escape character, but Microsoft didn’t ask for my advice when they decided to use the backslash as a path delimiter.

David

5

MS is sorta slow sometimes… lol

I see why I just now had that error… I guess I always used / instead of the \ key XD I just had forgoten about it till now.

6

i might want to add that it’s microsoft who decided to to it “wrong” everyone else used / but since M$ loves to break compatibility with other products they usualy do things just different enough to break it for everyone else.

7

You can also use raw strings if you don’t want to use escapes:

filename = r"Image\bar.png"

But yeah, using a forward slash is probably better anyways.