Convering double backslash to single backslash in Python 3

backslash, escaping, python-3.x, replace

Solution

Not sure if this is appropriate for your situation, but you could try using `unicode_escape`:

>>> t
'\\u0048\\u0065\\u006c\\u006c\\u006f\\u0020\\u20ac\\u0020\\u00b0'
>>> type(t)
<class 'str'>
>>> enc_t = t.encode('utf_8')
>>> enc_t
b'\\u0048\\u0065\\u006c\\u006c\\u006f\\u0020\\u20ac\\u0020\\u00b0'
>>> type(enc_t)
<class 'bytes'>
>>> dec_t = enc_t.decode('unicode_escape')
>>> type(dec_t)
<class 'str'>
>>> dec_t
'Hello € °'

Or in abbreviated form:

>>> t.encode('utf_8').decode('unicode_escape')
'Hello € °'

You take your string and encode it using `UTF-8`, and then decode it using `unicode_escape`.

Problem

I have a string like so: ``` >>> t '\\u0048\\u0065\\u006c\\u006c\\u006f\\u0020\\u20ac\\u0020\\u00b0' ``` That I made using a function that converts unicode to the representative Python escape sequences. Then, when I want to convert it back, I can't get rid of the double backslash so that it is interpreted as unicode again. How can this be done? ``` >>> t = unicode_encode(" >>> t '\\u0048\\u0065\\u006c\\u006c\\u006f\\u0020\\u20ac\\u0020\\u00b0' >>> print(t) \u0048\u0065\u006c\u006c\u006f\u0020\u20ac\u0020\u00b0 >>> t.replace('\\','X') 'Xu0048Xu0065Xu006cXu006cXu006fXu0020Xu20acXu0020Xu00b0' >>> t.replace('\\', '\\') '\\u0048\\u0065\\u006c\\u006c\\u006f\\u0020\\u20ac\\u0020\\u00b0' ``` Of course, I can't do this, either: ``` >>> t.replace('\\', '\') File "<ipython-input-155-b46c447d6c3d>", line 1 t.replace('\\', '\') ^ SyntaxError: EOL while scanning string literal ```

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