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?

Answer 1

Python 3:

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

Python 2:

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