I would like to display the escape characters when using print statement. E.g.
a = "Hello\tWorld\nHello World"
print a
Hello World
Hello World
I would like it to display: "Hello\tWorld\nHello\sWorld"
BartoszKP
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asked Jun 25, 2011 at 12:50
Use repr:
a = "Hello\tWorld\nHello World"
print[repr[a]]
# 'Hello\tWorld\nHello World'
Note you do not get \s for a space. I hope that was a typo...?
But if you really do want \s for spaces, you could do this:
print[repr[a].replace[' ',r'\s']]
answered Jun 25, 2011 at 12:52
unutbuunutbu
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1
Do
you merely want to print the string that way, or do you want that to be the internal representation of the string? If the latter, create it as a raw string by prefixing it with r: r"Hello\tWorld\nHello World".
>>> a = r"Hello\tWorld\nHello World"
>>> a # in the interpreter, this calls repr[]
'Hello\\tWorld\\nHello World'
>>> print a
Hello\tWorld\nHello World
Also, \s is not an escape character, except in regular expressions, and then it still has a much different meaning than what you're using it for.
answered Jun 25, 2011 at 13:28
robertrobert
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Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged python printing escaping character or ask your own question.
Problem Formulation
Python has special “escape characters” that start with the single backslash such as \n, \t, and \". If you print a string with escape characters, Python prints the special meaning—for example, a new line for the newline character \n.
s = "Learn\tprogramming\nwith\t\tFinxter!" print[s]
You can see that the output prints the special meaning of the escape characters:
Learn programming with Finxter!
How to print the string in its original form without interpreting the escape characters?
This is what we want:
s = "Learn\tprogramming\nwith\t\tFinxter!" print[s] # Learn\tprogramming\nwith\t\tFinxter!
Solution 1: repr[] – Print Without Interpreting Escape Characters
If you do want to print the escape characters in a string without interpreting them, i.e.,
skip their special meaning, use the built-in repr[s] function on the string s.
The following example shows how the print output was unaffected by the escape characters—Python prints without the special meaning of the escape characters \t and \n.
s = "Learn\tprogramming\nwith\t\tFinxter!" print[repr[s]] # Learn\tprogramming\nwith\t\tFinxter!
Python’s built-in repr[obj] function returns the standard string representation of the provided object. The function internally calls the method obj.__repr__[] which is defined per default for all objects.
You can learn more about the function in my detailed blog article and the following video tutorial:
Python repr[] Function – A Helpful Guide with Example
Solution 2: Print Raw String to Ignore Special Meaning of Escape Chars
Alternatively, you can print a raw string r"..." to print the string without interpreting the escape characters. For example, the statement print['r"Learn\tprogramming\nwith\t'] will simply print
the raw string "Learn\tprogramming\nwith\t".
s = r"Learn\tprogramming\nwith\t\tFinxter!" print[s] # Learn\tprogramming\nwith\t\tFinxter
This solution is actually the same as the first one because Python internally calls the repr[] function on the raw string.
However, what if you actually want to remove all escape characters from the string output?
Solution 3: Filtering Out All Escape Characters with string.isalnum[]
To clean a string from escape and all other special
characters, you can filter out all characters that are not alphanumeric using the string.isalnum[] method like so: ''.join[c for c in s if c.isalnum[]]. This returns a new string that is free from all escape characters.
Let’s have a look at this code snippet that removes the newline and tabular escape characters from the string:
s = 'Learn\tprogramming\nwith\t\tFinxter!' s_clean = ''.join[c for c in s if c.isalnum[]] print[s_clean] # LearnprogrammingwithFinxter
This code makes use of three concepts:
- The
''.join[]method to glue together all characters in an iterable. Learn more about this method in our detailed blog tutorial. - Generator expression
to dynamically create an iterable of characters and filter out each non-alphanumeric character. Learn more about this method in our full blog guide. - The
string.isalnum[]method to check for a given character whether it’s a non-special character. Learn more here.
I suggest you watch the following introduction on generator expression if you don’t feel very confident yet:
Understanding Generators In Python
Where to Go From Here?
Enough theory. Let’s get some practice!
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