Translating escaped characters

[Henrik S. Hansen]

How do you best go about translating characters like '\\n' to '\n'?
This is for a configuration file parser, where the "backslash
convention" is supported.

The naive approach -- re.sub('\\\\(.)', '\\\1', s) -- doesn't work, of
course. The best I've come up with so far is a special case for every
character to be translated. There must be an easier way?

--
Henrik S. Hansen http://freecode.dk/~hsh/
Computer science (software engineering) student
Free Software Foundation member #1702 (http://member.fsf.org)

[Steven Bethard]

Henrik S. Hansen <hsh <at> freecode.dk> writes:

How do you best go about translating characters like '\\n' to '\n'?

Is this what you're looking for?

'\\n'.decode('string_escape') '\n' '\n'.encode('string_escape')

'\\n'

There's some info about it here:

http://docs.python.org/lib/node127.html

and searching Google Groups shows up a few things too:

http://groups.google.com/groups?q=escape+sequences&
meta=group%3Dcomp.lang.python.*

(Sorry, the URL wrapped.)

Steve

[Henrik S. Hansen]

Steven Bethard <st************@gmail.com> writes:

How do you best go about translating characters like '\\n' to '\n'?

Is this what you're looking for?

'\\n'.decode('string_escape') '\n' '\n'.encode('string_escape')

'\\n'

Precisely, thank you.

--
Henrik S. Hansen http://freecode.dk/~hsh/
Computer science (software engineering) student
Free Software Foundation member #1702 (http://member.fsf.org)