unicode within a RE grouping

[bluefrog]

Hi

I'm getting an error for the following:

import re
pattern = re.compile(r"(?u)\w+")
list = pattern.findall(ur"ñ")
print(list)

Error:
    list = pattern.findall(ur"ñ")
                               ^
SyntaxError: invalid syntax

Can anybody suggest what the problem might be ?

[scidam]

If you look at Python lexical analysis rules, you can see that stringprefix doesn't contain ur as a prefix for strings. So, ur"some_string" is illegal construction in Python.

[snippsat]

It's illegal in python 3 as pointed out bye @scidam.
In python 2 ur prefix was used when needed to combine raw string and Unicode in a regex pattern.

# Python 2.7
>>> import re
>>>
>>> pattern = re.compile(ur"(ñ)")
>>> uni_char = pattern.search(u'helloñ world')
>>> uni_char.group(1)
u'\xf1'
>>> print(uni_char.group(1))
ñ

One of the biggest changes moving to Python 3 was Unicode.
In Python 3 are all strings sequences of Unicode character.
So there is no longer need for u prefix,we will not see u'\xf1'.
r raw string should still always be used in regex patten,because of escape character.

# Python 3.6
>>> s = 'ñ'
>>> s
'ñ'

# Python 3.6
>>> import re
>>>
>>> pattern = re.compile(r"(ñ)")
>>> uni_char = pattern.search('helloñ world')
>>> uni_char.group(1)
'ñ'