> It seems that escape is pretty dumb. The documentations says that
> re.escape escapes all non-alphanumeric characters, and it does that
> faithfully. It would seem more useful to have a list of meta-characters
> and just escape those. This is more true in Py3k when str can have
> thousands of possible characters that could be considered alphanumeric.

The usual convention is to escape everything that is
ASCII and not A-Za-z0-9_, in case other punctuation
becomes special in the future.  But I agree -- escaping
just the actual special characters makes the most sense.

Russ