casting raw strings python

Question

Given a variable which holds a string is there a quick way to cast that into another raw string variable?

The following code should illustrate what I’m after:

line1 = "hurr..n..durr"
line2 = r"hurr..n..durr"

print(line1 == line2)  # outputs False
print(("%r"%line1)[1:-1] == line2)  # outputs True

The closest I have found so far is the %r formatting flag which seems to return a raw string albeit within single quote marks. Is there any easier way to do this kind of thing?

Asked By: dave

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Source

Answer 1

Python 3:

"hurr..n..durr".encode('unicode-escape').decode()

Python 2:

"hurr..n..durr".encode('string-escape')

Answered By: Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams

Answer 2

Yet another way:

>>> s = "hurr..n..durr"
>>> print repr(s).strip("'")
hurr..n..durr

Answered By: Seth

Answer 3

Above it was shown how to encode.

'hurr..n..durr'.encode('string-escape')

This way will decode.

r'hurr..n..durr'.decode('string-escape')

Ex.

In [12]: print 'hurr..n..durr'.encode('string-escape')
hurr..n..durr

In [13]: print r'hurr..n..durr'.decode('string-escape')
hurr..
..durr

This allows one to “cast/trasform raw strings” in both directions. A practical case is when the json contains a raw string and I want to print it nicely.

{
    "Description": "Some lengthy description.nParagraph 2.nParagraph 3.",
    ...
}

I would do something like this.

print json.dumps(json_dict, indent=4).decode('string-escape')

Answered By: Al Conrad

casting raw strings python

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