Stupid Python Tricks – Unescape a String

Ever been given a pre-escaped string like ‘\\r\\n’ and wanted the actual non-escaped version?

Try this:

>>> ‘\\\\\\\\’.decode(’string_escape’)
‘\\\\’

I just found it today. Pretty cool, eh.

Posted by Greg Pinero (Primary Searcher) on Jun 5th, 2009 and is filed under Python.

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2 Responses to “Stupid Python Tricks – Unescape a String”

  1. Anonymous says:
    June 5th, 2009 at 5:28 pm

    The given example cannot be used at an interactive prompt. You need '\\\\' or r'\\' and the output would be '\\' (that is, a single backslash escaped for the repr).

  2. Greg Pinero (Primary Searcher) says:
    June 5th, 2009 at 6:22 pm

    @Anonymous, Fixed it. Thanks.