Question

I have a function that asks for a delimiter. This can be \t. However, this is seen as a real tab. So if I have this code

def example(dataToBeSplit, delimiter):
    return dataToBeSplit.split(delimiter)
example('some\ttext','\t')

The input given to example is example('some\ttext',' ')

How can I prevent the \t to be turned into a real tab, without having to give \\t to the function?

*if I put four actual spaces it gets filtered out, so see -four spaces- as four real spaces

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edit:

Ok so from zefciu’s answer I now do

def example(dataToBeSplit, delimiter):
    return dataToBeSplit.split(repr(delimiter))
example('some\ttext','\t')

But still wondering if there isn’t a way to do this in the

def example(dataToBeSplit, delimiter):

part

Answer 1

If you want to see the string in the form it can be accepted by python, use repr():

>>> print repr('some\ttext')
'some\ttext'