Update deprecated and discouraged code constructs

[Sichter]

Sorry to start with these boring and pedantic changes ;–). But I am trying to fix some problems in FPCBot, and during the work on them some deprecated or generally discouraged code constructs become apparent. Therefore I propose to update the following items.

• Strings: Unrecognized escape sequences in normal strings produce a DeprecationWarning since Python 3.6 and a SyntaxWarning since Python 3.12. They may produce a SyntaxError in the future. Therefore let’s prefix strings containing special RegEx escape sequences like \( with r, e.g. r"\(".

• None: Comparisons with None should use is or is not instead of == or != because None is the sole instance of the NoneType type and therefore uses identity checks.

• Exceptions: Using a bare except: is generally discouraged because it will catch even terminating exceptions – that is not what we want. Therefore let’s use at least except Exception: which catches only non-terminating exceptions.

• Module re, function split(): Since Python 3.13 passing the optional parameters flags and maxsplit as positional arguments is deprecated, they will become keyword-only parameters in the future.

• Module re, function sub(): Since Python 3.13 passing the optional parameters count and flags as positional arguments is deprecated, they will become keyword-only parameters in the future.

• Module threading, function activeCount(): This function is deprecated, let’s use active_count() instead.

All of these changes should be backward compatible and work also in older versions of Python 3.x.

[Zitrax]

Thanks a lot for looking into this, as I mentioned I am not really active on Wikimedia now. The other collaborator for this repository is @eatcha-wikimedia - I don't know if he/she is active?

The changes look good to me, I'll merge them. I assume the bot will pick it up, but I am currently not aware of how it's running now.

Ping me if there is any issues.

[Sichter]

Thank you very much, Zitrax! I promise some more interesting (and, hopefully, useful) pull requests will come soon … All the best!

[katiechan]

Thanks Zitrax, the bot should update its code against this repo once a night so we should see the effect of the changes in the next run or two.

[Sichter]

Two runs of the bot later it seems to operate normally so I hope the code changes were OK.