So I can't seem to figure this out... I have a string say, "a\\nb"
and I want this to become "a\nb"
. I've tried all the following and none seem to work;
>>> a
'a\\nb'
>>> a.replace("\\","\")
File "<stdin>", line 1
a.replace("\\","\")
^
SyntaxError: EOL while scanning string literal
>>> a.replace("\\",r"\")
File "<stdin>", line 1
a.replace("\\",r"\")
^
SyntaxError: EOL while scanning string literal
>>> a.replace("\\",r"\\")
'a\\\\nb'
>>> a.replace("\\","\\")
'a\\nb'
I really don't understand why the last one works, because this works fine:
>>> a.replace("\\","%")
'a%nb'
Is there something I'm missing here?
EDIT I understand that \ is an escape character. What I'm trying to do here is turn all \\n
\\t
etc. into \n
\t
etc. and replace doesn't seem to be working the way I imagined it would.
>>> a = "a\\nb"
>>> b = "a\nb"
>>> print a
a\nb
>>> print b
a
b
>>> a.replace("\\","\\")
'a\\nb'
>>> a.replace("\\\\","\\")
'a\\nb'
I want string a to look like string b. But replace isn't replacing slashes like I thought it would.
There's no need to use replace for this.
What you have is a encoded string (using the string_escape
encoding) and you want to decode it:
>>> s = r"Escaped\nNewline"
>>> print s
Escaped\nNewline
>>> s.decode('string_escape')
'Escaped\nNewline'
>>> print s.decode('string_escape')
Escaped
Newline
>>> "a\\nb".decode('string_escape')
'a\nb'
In Python 3:
>>> import codecs
>>> codecs.decode('\\n\\x21', 'unicode_escape')
'\n!'
You are missing, that \ is the escape character.
Look here: http://docs.python.org/reference/lexical_analysis.html
at 2.4.1 "Escape Sequence"
Most importantly \n is a newline character.
And \\ is an escaped escape character :D
>>> a = 'a\\\\nb'
>>> a
'a\\\\nb'
>>> print a
a\\nb
>>> a.replace('\\\\', '\\')
'a\\nb'
>>> print a.replace('\\\\', '\\')
a\nb
Your original string, a = 'a\\nb'
does not actually have two '\'
characters, the first one is an escape for the latter. If you do, print a
, you'll see that you actually have only one '\'
character.
>>> a = 'a\\nb'
>>> print a
a\nb
If, however, what you mean is to interpret the '\n'
as a newline character, without escaping the slash, then:
>>> b = a.replace('\\n', '\n')
>>> b
'a\nb'
>>> print b
a
b
It's because, even in "raw" strings (=strings with an r
before the starting quote(s)), an unescaped escape character cannot be the last character in the string. This should work instead:
'\\ '[0]
In Python string literals, backslash is an escape character. This is also true when the interactive prompt shows you the value of a string. It will give you the literal code representation of the string. Use the print
statement to see what the string actually looks like.
This example shows the difference:
>>> '\\'
'\\'
>>> print '\\'
\
r'a\\nb'.replace('\\\\', '\\')
or
'a\nb'.replace('\n', '\\n')