What does preceding a string literal with “r” mean?

Question

Can anyone tell me what does preceding a sting literal with "r" means? I know that it's been used for building regular expressions across multiple lines as a method argument for re.compile(). So, what I thought was r maybe stands for RegExp

Example

regex = re.compile(

    r'^[A-Z]'

    r'[A-Z0-9-]'

    r'[A-Z]$', re.IGNORECASE

)

But What does r means in this case?

Answer 1

It means, the respective string is considered to be a raw string. 

So, All the escape codes will be ignored.

How '\n' will be treated as newline character, same like r'\n' will be considered as characters \ followed by n.

Click on this link for more details about Python string literals

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