How to replace a double backslash with a single backslash in python?

Question

I have a string. In that string are double backslashes. I want to replace the double backslashes with single backslashes, so that unicode char codes can be parsed correctly.

(Pdb) p fetched_page
'Chapter 0<\/span><\/strong><\/p>
Chapter 0 in \u201cDreaming in Code\u201d give a brief description of programming in its early years and how and why programmers are still struggling today...'

Inside of this string, you can see escaped unicode character codes, such as:

\u201c

I want to turn this into:

\u201c

Attempt 1:

fetched_page.replace('\\', '\')

but this doesn't work -- it searches for quadruple backslashes.

Attempt 2:

fetched_page.replace('\', '\')

But this results in an end of line error.

Attempt 3:

fetched_page.decode('string_escape')

But this had no effect on the text. All the double backslashes remained as double backslashes.

user_919812 · Answer

Python3:

>>> b'\u201c'.decode('unicode_escape')
'“'

or

>>> '\u201c'.encode().decode('unicode_escape')
'“'

user_13352537 · Answer

Interesting question, but in reality, you have only one slash symbol. It's just a way how it represents in python. If you make a list of symbols which string contains? like:

[s for s in string_object]

it shows every symbol and represents "" as "\", but you don't have to be confused about it. It is the single symbol actually. So, in the case of my example, it's just not a double backslash.

real example:

>>> [s for s in 'usnDu\NgAnA{I']
['u', 's', 'n', 'D', 'u', '\', 'N', 'g', 'A', 'n', 'A', '{', 'I']

How to replace a double backslash with a single backslash in python?

6 Answers