How to handle escape characters in pyspark. Trying to replace escape character with NULL

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I'm trying to replace a escape character with NULL in pyspark dataframe. Data in dataframe looks like below

Col1|Col2|Col3 
1|\026\026|026|abcd026efg.

Col2 is a garbage data and trying to replace with NULL. Tried replace and regex_replace functions to replace '\026' with Null value, because of escape character (" \ "), data is not replaced with NULL value.

 replace(col2, "026",  'abcd') 
 replace(Col2, "\026",  'abcd')

Finally,

I want my data as

Col1|Col2|Col3 
1|NULL|026|abcd026efg.

Highly appreciate for thoughts to resolve this scenario.

Thanks -EVR

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unicode-escapes pyspark replace
1 Answers

Use replace all digits and preceding non digits

 import pyspark.sql.functions as F
 df.withColumn('col2',F.regexp_replace('col2','\D\d+',None)).show()

+----+----+-----------+
|col1|col2|       col3|
+----+----+-----------+
|   1|null|abcd026efg.|
+----+----+-----------+
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