Question

I ended up with a huge, single line string literal (don’t ask me how) where everything is escaped (mostly), including new lines and double quotes. Problem is, I want the original string. The string is huge so I’m not even sure how to begin. Here’s what I have:

"This\n is \"nice\",\nain\'t it?"

This is what I want:

This
 is "nice",
ain't it?

Again, the problem is that other shell sensitive stuff is not escaped (like $, or !), and that the string is couple of megabytes.

Answer 1

Python one-liner:

open("unescaped.txt", "w").write(eval(open("string.txt").read()))

You should have python on most linux installs.