What does the \newline escape sequence mean in python?

Question

I found the sequence \\newline in a list of escape sequences in the python documentation. I wonder how it is used and for what. At least in my interpreter it se

Answer 1

The documentation you are alluding to is explaining how a backslash followed by a literal newline is ignored, as if the next line were physically joined with the line on which the starting backslash was found.

The string \newline' has no special meaning; it is exactly what you say you think it is.

Answer 2

It refers to the actual newline character - the one with character code "10" (0x0a) - not the text sequence "newline".

So, an example is like:

print("a\
b")

Here, the backslash is succeeded by the newline, inside a string, and what is printed is just "ab" with nothing apart.

it differs from \n - in here, the characer following the backslash is n (0x6e), and this sequence is translated to \x0a on parsing the string. On \<newline>, the source string contains the \x0a character and that is replaced by an empty string.

Maybe the documentation on that page would be more clear if it would read \<newline> instead of just \newline.