Adding backslashes without escaping Python

Question

I need to escape a  amp   ampersand  character in a string  The problem is whenever I string   string replace    amp       amp    the result is     amp    An extra backslash is added to escape the original backslash  How do I remove this extra backslash

User · Answer

The result     amp   is only displayed - actually the string is   amp     gt  gt  gt  str     amp    gt  gt  gt  new str   str replace   amp       amp     gt  gt  gt  new str     amp    gt  gt  gt  print new str   amp    Try it in a shell

User · Answer

There is no extra backslash  it s just formatted that way in the interactive environment  Try   print string   Then you can see that there really is no extra backslash

User · Answer

printing a list can also cause this problem  im new in python  so it confused me a bit too     gt  gt  gt myList           gt  gt  gt print myList         gt  gt  gt print    join myList       similarly    gt  gt  gt myList       amp     gt  gt  gt print myList      amp     gt  gt  gt print    join myList    amp

User · Answer

The extra backslash is not actually added  it s just added by the repr   function to indicate that it s a literal backslash  The Python interpreter uses the repr   function  which calls   repr     on the object  when the result of an expression needs to be printed    gt  gt  gt             gt  gt  gt  print         gt  gt  gt  print        repr

User · Answer

gt  gt  gt      amp         amp   True  gt  gt  gt  len     amp    2  gt  gt  gt  print     amp      amp    Or in other words      amp   only contains one backslash  It s just escaped in the python shell s output for clarity

User · Answer

Python treats   in literal string in a special way  This is so you can type   n  to mean newline or   t  to mean tab Since    amp   doesn t mean anything special to Python  instead of causing an error  the Python lexical analyser implicitly adds the extra   for you   Really it is better to use    amp  or r   amp   instead of    amp    The r here means raw string and means that   isn t treated specially unless it is right before the quote character at the start of the string   In the interactive console  Python uses repr to display the result  so that is why you see the double      If you print your string or use len string  you will see that it is really only the 2 characters  Some examples   gt  gt  gt   Here  s a backslash       Here s a backslash       gt  gt  gt  print  Here  s a backslash      Here s a backslash     gt  gt  gt   Here  s a backslash      Here  s a double quote       Here  s a backslash      Here  s a double quote       gt  gt  gt  print  Here  s a backslash      Here  s a double quote      Here s a backslash     Here s a double quote      To Clarify the point Peter makes in his comment see this link     Unlike Standard C  all unrecognized   escape sequences are left in the   string unchanged  i e   the backslash   is left in the string   This behavior   is useful when debugging  if an escape   sequence is mistyped  the resulting   output is more easily recognized as   broken   It is also important to note   that the escape sequences marked as       Unicode only     in the table above   fall into the category of unrecognized   escapes for non-Unicode string   literals

[python] Adding backslashes without escaping [Python]

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