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In an attempt to answer this question, I managed to get the string to print the escape characters by escaping the backslash.

When I try to generalize it to escape all escaped characters, it seems to do nothing:

>>> a = "word\nanother word\n\tthird word" >>> a 'word\nanother word\n\tthird word' >>> print a word another word third word >>> b = a.replace("\\", "\\\\") >>> b 'word\nanother word\n\tthird word' >>> print b word another word third word

but this same method for specific escape characters, it does work:

>>> b = a.replace('\n', '\\n') >>> print b word\nanother word\n third word >>> b 'word\\nanother word\\n\tthird word'

Is there a general way to achieve this? Should include \n, \t, \r, etc.

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  • There are no literal backslashes to match in your strings. The literal contains the two-character sequence \n to specify a newline, but Python converts that to a single, literal linefeed character in the resulting str object. Commented Dec 9, 2016 at 21:28

1 Answer 1

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Define your string as raw using r'text', like in the code below: 

a = r"word\nanother word\n\tthird word" print(a) word\nanother word\n\tthird word b = "word\nanother word\n\tthird word" print(b) word another word third word
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Raw string are exactly what I was looking for, thanks!

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