Question

I want to receive a delimiter like ‘\t’ (tab) from command line,
and use it to parse a text file.

If I put

delimiter = sys.argv[1]

in the code, and type from the command line

$ python mycode.py "\t"

delimiter is '\\t' i.e., python does its thing to preserve input string as is.

I want to convert this to ‘\t’ so that I can use e.g.,

'a\tb\tc'.split(delimiter)

to get ['a','b','c'].

I’ve tried to convert ‘\’ to ‘\’, but failed.

Is there a built-in python function to handle regex from the command line?

Answer 1

In Python 2 you can use str.decode('string_escape'):

>>> '\\t'.decode('string_escape')
'\t'

In Python 3 you have to encode the string to bytes first and then use unicode_escape:

>>> '\\t'.encode().decode('unicode_escape')
'\t'

Both solutions accept any escape sequence and will decode them correctly, so you could even use some fancy unicode stuff:

>>> '\\t\\n\\u2665'.encode().decode('unicode_escape')
'\t\n♥'