I want the newline \n to show up explicitly when printing a string retrieved from elsewhere. So if the string is 'abc\ndef' I don't want this to happen:
>>> print(line)
abc
def
but instead this:
>>> print(line)
abc\ndef
Is there a way to modify print, or modify the argument, or maybe another function entirely, to accomplish this?
Another way that you can stop python using escape characters is to use a raw string like this:
>>> print(r"abc\ndef")
abc\ndef
or
>>> string = "abc\ndef"
>>> print (repr(string))
>>> 'abc\ndef'
the only proplem with using repr() is that it puts your string in single quotes, it can be handy if you want to use a quote
Just encode it with the 'string_escape' codec.
>>> print "foo\nbar".encode('string_escape')
foo\nbar
In python3, 'string_escape' has become unicode_escape. Additionally, we need to be a little more careful about bytes/unicode so it involves a decoding after the encoding:
>>> print("foo\nbar".encode("unicode_escape").decode("utf-8"))
