Message 83363 - Python tracker
I've hit this, too, and it's annoyed me. So here's a patch against trunk that should fix it. The idea is: whenever unicode_literals are turned on (or the -U command line flag is passed), to convert r"\u" to "\u005c\u0075" and r"\U" to "\u005c\u0055" for every string literal in the source file before passing the string to PyUnicode_DecodeRawUnicodeEscape.