Question

Does anyone know the escape sequence to use a \ in a list.

List = ['a','B','c','D','\'] # My python interpreter thinks I want 
                             # a line continuation but I want the 
                             # actual  ASCII character. 

Answer 1

This will work,

  List = ['a','B','c','D','\\']

You “escape” the \ with another \ in front. As an aside, “List” is probably not the best choice for a variable name.

Basically any time you want to use the \ as a simple “\” character and not the
special Python character you have to use two of them.

So for instance, this will look for a single backslash in the list and print a single
backslash, even though two are used in the code.

for c in List:
    if c == '\\':
       print 'Found \\.'

Output:

Found \.