Removing backslash in Python at runtime

user_10736997 0
Viewed 265

I need a way for my function to take in a string at runtime and remove the backslashes while KEEPING the character it is prepended to. So for \a I must get a. This must also work for nonescaped characters like \e -> e.

I've scoured the internet looking for a general solution to this problem, but there does not appear to be one. The best solution I have found uses a dictionary to build the string from scratch like: How to prevent automatic escaping of special characters in Python

escape_dict={'\a':r'\a',
         '\b':r'\b',
         '\c':r'\c',
         '\f':r'\f',
         '\n':r'\n',
         '\r':r'\r',
         '\t':r'\t',
         '\v':r'\v',
         '\'':r'\'',
         '\"':r'\"',
         '\0':r'\0',
         '\1':r'\1',
         '\2':r'\2',
         '\3':r'\3',
         '\4':r'\4',
         '\5':r'\5',
         '\6':r'\6',
         '\7':r'\7',
         '\8':r'\8',
         '\9':r'\9'}
def raw(text):
    """Returns a raw string representation of the string"""
    new_string=''
    for char in text:
        try: 
            new_string += escape_dict[char]
        except KeyError: 
            new_string += char
    return new_string

However this fails in general because of conflicts between the escaped numbers and escaped letters. Using the 3 digit numbers like \001 instead of \1 also fails because the output will have additional numbers in it which defeats the purpose. I should simply remove the backslash. Other proposed solutions based on encodings like the one found here Process escape sequences in a string in Python

also does not work because this converts just converts the escape characters into the hex code. \a gets converted to \x07. Even if were to somehow remove this the character a is still lost.

character-encoding python string
1 Answers

There is a function you may want to use for this purpose called repr().

repr() computes the “official” string representation of an object (a representation that has all information about the object) and str() is used to compute the “informal” string representation of an object (a representation that is useful for printing the object).

Example:

s = 'This is a \t string tab. And this is a \n newline character'
print(s)  # This will print `s` with a tab and a newline inserted in the string
print(repr(s))  # This prints `s` as the original string with backslash and the whatever letter you have used
# So maybe you can use this somewhere
print(repr(s).replace('\\', '_'))
# And obviously this might not have worked for you
print(s.replace('\\', '_'))

So you can replace the backslash from your string by using repr(<your string>)

user_134580180
Related