How to treat \t as a regular string in python
python, python-2.7, replace, string
Solution
You can prefix the string with `r` and create a raw-string:
str(contents).replace(r'\t', ' ')
Raw-strings do not process escape sequences. Below is a demonstration:
>>> mystr = r'a\t\tb' # Escape sequences are ignored
>>> print(mystr)
a\t\tb
>>> print(mystr.replace('\t', ' ')) # This replaces tab characters
a\t\tb
>>> print(mystr.replace(r'\t', ' ')) # This replaces the string '\t'
a b
>>>
Problem
I need to remove \t from a string that is being written however when ever I do ``` str(contents).replace('\t', ' ') ``` it just removes all of the tabs. I understand this is because \t is how you write tabs but I want to know how to just treat it like a regular string.