How do you escape escape sequence in python?

Question

Escape Characters

To insert characters that are illegal in a string, use an escape character.

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Escape Characters
Raw strings
Common escape sequences
What is the use of '\ t escape sequence?
What is the '\ n escape character?

An escape character is a backslash \ followed by the character you want to insert.

An example of an illegal character is a double quote inside a string that is surrounded by double quotes:

Example

You will get an error if you use double quotes inside a string that is surrounded by double quotes:

txt = "We are the so-called "Vikings" from the north."

Try it Yourself »

To fix this problem, use the escape character \":

Example

The escape character allows you to use double quotes when you normally would not be allowed:

txt = "We are the so-called \"Vikings\" from the north."

Try it Yourself »

Other escape characters used in Python:

Code	Result	Try it
\'	Single Quote	Try it »
\\	Backslash	Try it »
\n	New Line	Try it »
\r	Carriage Return	Try it »
\t	Tab	Try it »
\b	Backspace	Try it »
\f	Form Feed
\ooo	Octal value	Try it »
\xhh	Hex value	Try it »

Escape sequences allow you to include special characters in strings. To do this, simply add a backslash (\) before the character you want to escape.

For example, imagine you initialized a string with single quotes:

s = 'Hey, whats up?'
print(s)

Output:

Hey, whats up?

But if you include an apostrophe without escaping it, then you will get an error:

s = 'Hey, what's up?'
print(s)

Output:

  File "main.py", line 1
    s = 'Hey, what's up?'
                   ^
SyntaxError: invalid syntax

To fix this, just escape the apostrophe:

s = 'Hey, what\'s up?'
print(s)

To add newlines to your string, use \n:

print("Multiline strings\ncan be created\nusing escape sequences.")

Output:

Multiline strings
can be created
using escape sequences.

An important thing to remember is that, if you want to include a backslash character in a string, you will need to escape that. For example, if you want to print a directory path in Windows, you'll need to escape each backslash in the string:

print("C:\\Users\\Pat\\Desktop")

Output:

C:\Users\Pat\Desktop

Raw strings

A raw string can be used by prefixing the string with r or R, which allows for backslashes to be included without the need to escape them. For example:

print(r"Backslashes \ don't need to be escaped in raw strings.")

Output:

Backslashes \ don't need to be escaped in raw strings.

But keep in mind that unescaped backslashes at the end of a raw string will cause and error:

print(r"There's an unescaped backslash at the end of this string\")

Output:

  File "main.py", line 1
    print(r"There's an unescaped backslash at the end of this string\")
                                                                      ^
SyntaxError: EOL while scanning string literal

Common escape sequences

Escape Sequence	Meaning
\	Backslash (`\`)
'	Single quote (`'`)
"	Double quote (`"`)
\n	ASCII Linefeed (adds newline)
\b	ASCII Backspace

A full list of escape sequences can be found here in the Python docs.

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EDIT: The problem is actually how print works with lists & strings. It prints the representation of the string, not the string itself, the representation of a string containing just a backslash is '\\'. So findall is actually finding the single backslash correctly, but print isn't printing it as you'd expect. Try:

>>> print(re.findall(r'\\',"i am \\nit")[0])
\

(The following is my original answer, it can be ignored (it's entirely irrelevant), I'd misinterpreted the question initially. But it seems to have been upvoted a bit, so I'll leave it here.)

The r prefix on a string means the string is in "raw" mode, that is, \ are not treated as special characters (it doesn't have anything to do with "regex").

However, r'\' doesn't work, as you can't end a raw string with a backslash, it's stated in the docs:

Even in a raw string, string quotes can be escaped with a backslash, but the backslash remains in the string; for example, r"\"" is a valid string literal consisting of two characters: a backslash and a double quote; r"\" is not a valid string literal (even a raw string cannot end in an odd number of backslashes). Specifically, a raw string cannot end in a single backslash (since the backslash would escape the following quote character).

But you actually can use a non-raw string to get a single backslash: "\\".

What is the use of '\ t escape sequence?

For example, you can use escape sequences to put such characters as tab, carriage return, and backspace into an output stream. ... Escape sequences..

What is the '\ n escape character?

In particular, the \n escape sequence represents the newline character. A \n in a printf format string tells awk to start printing output at the beginning of a newline.