Safe string escaping?

[Grant Olson]

I have a data file that has lines like "foo\n\0" where the \n\0 is acutally
backslash+n+backslash+0. I.E. a repr of the string from python would be
"foo\\n\\0". I'm trying to convert this string into one that contains
actual newlines and whatnot. I feel like there has to be a better and safer
way to do this than eval("'%s'" % "foo\\n\\0") but I'm not finding it.

Any tips would be appreciated,

Grant

[Michael Hoffman]

Grant Olson wrote:

I have a data file that has lines like "foo\n\0" where the \n\0 is acutally
backslash+n+backslash+0. I.E. a repr of the string from python would be
"foo\\n\\0". I'm trying to convert this string into one that contains
actual newlines and whatnot.

r"foo\n\0".decode("string_escape")
--
Michael Hoffman

[Bengt Richter]

On Mon, 07 Mar 2005 19:24:43 -0500, "Grant Olson" <ol*****@verizon.net> wrote:

I have a data file that has lines like "foo\n\0" where the \n\0 is acutally
backslash+n+backslash+0. I.E. a repr of the string from python would be
"foo\\n\\0". I'm trying to convert this string into one that contains
actual newlines and whatnot. I feel like there has to be a better and safer
way to do this than eval("'%s'" % "foo\\n\\0") but I'm not finding it.

Any tips would be appreciated,

s = "foo\\n\\0"
s 'foo\\n\\0' list(s) ['f', 'o', 'o', '\\', 'n', '\\', '0'] sd = s.decode('string_escape')
sd 'foo\n\x00' list(sd) ['f', 'o', 'o', '\n', '\x00']

You could make a de-escaping utility function, e.g.,
def de_esc(s): return s.decode('string_escape') ... s 'foo\\n\\0' de_esc(s)

'foo\n\x00'

You might want to write a test to verify that it does what you
expect for the kind of escaped string you are using.

Regards,
Bengt Richter