How to replace "\" with "\\" in python(type string)? I tried line = line.replace("\", "\\"), but it gives error SyntaxError: unexpected character after line continuation character
2 Answers
In Python strings, \ is an escape, meaning something like, "do something special with the next character." The proper way of specifying \ itself is with two of them:
line = line.replace("\\", "\\\\")
Funny enough, I had to do the same thing to your post to get it to format properly.
Comments
To replace \ with \\ in a Python string, you must write \\ in the Python string literal for each \ you want. Therefore:
line = line.replace("\\", "\\\\")
You can often use raw strings to avoid needing the double backslashes, but not in this case: r"\" is a syntax error, because the r modifier doesn't do what most people think it does. (It means both the backspace and the following character are included in the resulting string, so r"\" is actually a backslash followed by a quote, and the literal has no terminating quote!)
1 Comment
medovi40k
Thank you very much, your solution is working!
line = line.replace(r"\", r"\\")... and this doesn't work... Hmmm.r"\"is a syntax errorline = line.replace("\\", "\\\\")as answered belowr'\\'seems to produce a string with two backslashes (even though the first isn't actually escaping the second). So you could doline = line.replace('\\', r'\\'), or you just doline =line.replace('\\', '\\\\')and avoid the confusion raw strings ending in slash involve.r"\"is viewed by the parser as a raw string beginning with a double-quote, and then it gets confused when the third double-quote closes the raw string (r"\", r"is treated as one literal), and it's followed by\(which it thinks is a line continuation character), but then sees more on the same line after it.