Escape regex special characters in a Python string

Question

Does Python have a function that I can use to escape special characters in a regular expression   For example  I m  stuck     should become I  m   stuck

User · Answer

Use repr   1 -1   In this case  the double quotes don t need to be escaped  The  -1 1  slice is to remove the single quote from the beginning and the end    gt  gt  gt  x   raw input   I m  stuck      gt  gt  gt  print x I m  stuck      gt  gt  gt  print repr x  1 -1  I  m  stuck        Or maybe you just want to escape a phrase to paste into your program  If so  do this    gt  gt  gt  raw input   I m  stuck      I  m  stuck

User · Answer

I m surprised no one has mentioned using regular expressions via re sub     import re print re sub r             r    1    it  s  this       it s   this   print re sub r             r    1    it  s  this       it  s  this  print re sub r             r    1    it  s  this       it  s    this     Important things to note    In the search pattern  include   as well as the character s  you re looking for  You re going to be using   to escape your characters  so you need to escape that as well  Put parentheses around the search pattern  e g          so that the substitution pattern can use the found character when it adds   in front of it   That s what  1 does  uses the value of the first parenthesized group   The r in front of r         means it s a raw string  Raw strings use different rules for escaping backslashes  To write        as a plain string  you d need to double all the backslashes and write            Raw strings are friendlier when you re writing regular expressions  In the substitution pattern  you need to escape   to distinguish it from a backslash that precedes a substitution group  e g   1  hence r    1   To write that as a plain string  you d need        1   mdash  and nobody wants that

User · Answer

As it was mentioned above  the answer depends on your case  If you want to escape a string for a regular expression then you should use re escape    But if you want to escape a specific set of characters then use this lambda function    gt  gt  gt  escape   lambda s  escapechar  specialchars     join escapechar   c if c in specialchars or c    escapechar else c for c in s   gt  gt  gt  s   raw input   I m  stuck      gt  gt  gt  print s I m  stuck      gt  gt  gt  print escape s               I m   stuck

User · Answer

If you only want to replace some characters you could use this   import re  print re sub r                                 lt   gt      -     r    1    example string

User · Answer

Use re escape  gt  gt  gt  import re  gt  gt  gt  re escape r   a              a            gt  gt  gt  print re escape r   a           a        gt  gt  gt  re escape  www stackoverflow com    www   stackoverflow   com   gt  gt  gt  print re escape  www stackoverflow com    www  stackoverflow  com  Repeating it here   re escape string  Return string with all non-alphanumerics backslashed  this is useful if you want to match an arbitrary literal string that may have regular expression metacharacters in it   As of Python 3 7 re escape   was changed to escape only characters which are meaningful to regex operations

User · Answer

It s not that hard   def escapeSpecialCharacters   text  characters        for character in characters          text   text replace  character         character       return text   gt  gt  gt  escapeSpecialCharacters   I  m  stuck                 I    m    stuck          gt  gt  gt  print      I  m   stuck

[python] Escape regex special characters in a Python string

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