gh-80143: Add clarification for escape characters (GH-92292) (GH-92630)

(cherry picked from commit 549567c6e70da4846c105a18a1a89e7dd09680d7)

Co-authored-by: slateny <46876382+slateny@users.noreply.github.com>

diff --git a/Doc/reference/lexical_analysis.rst b/Doc/reference/lexical_analysis.rst
index 17c0fb4a51eb4fb8e1926e17f95c08fcf544e442..b8f9ca21c06825270e51eac79eb26cd7bc09186e 100644 (file)
--- a/Doc/reference/lexical_analysis.rst
+++ b/Doc/reference/lexical_analysis.rst
@@ -447,9 +447,11 @@ see section :ref:`encodings`.
 In plain English: Both types of literals can be enclosed in matching single quotes
 (``'``) or double quotes (``"``).  They can also be enclosed in matching groups
 of three single or double quotes (these are generally referred to as
-*triple-quoted strings*).  The backslash (``\``) character is used to escape
-characters that otherwise have a special meaning, such as newline, backslash
-itself, or the quote character.
+*triple-quoted strings*). The backslash (``\``) character is used to give special
+meaning to otherwise ordinary characters like ``n``, which means 'newline' when
+escaped (``\n``). It can also be used to escape characters that otherwise have a
+special meaning, such as newline, backslash itself, or the quote character.
+See :ref:`escape sequences <escape-sequences>` below for examples.
 
 .. index::
    single: b'; bytes literal
@@ -508,6 +510,8 @@ retained), except that three unescaped quotes in a row terminate the literal.  (
    single: \u; escape sequence
    single: \U; escape sequence
 
+.. _escape-sequences:
+
 Unless an ``'r'`` or ``'R'`` prefix is present, escape sequences in string and
 bytes literals are interpreted according to rules similar to those used by
 Standard C.  The recognized escape sequences are: