Question

I’m trying to learn python, and I’m pretty new at it, and I can’t figure this one part out.
Basically, what I’m doing now is something that takes the source code of a webpage, and takes out everything that isn’t words.

Webpages have a lot of \n and \t, and I want something that will find \ and delete everything between it and the next ‘ ‘.

def removebackslash(source):
    while(source.find('\') != -1):
        startback = source.find('\')
        endback = source[startback:].find(' ') + startback + 1
        source = source[0:startback] + source[endback:]
    return source

is what I have. It doesn’t work like this, because the \' doesn’t close the string, but when I change \ to \\, it interprets the string as \\. I can’t figure out anything that is interpreted at '\'

Answer 1

\ is an escape character; it either gives characters a special meaning or takes said special meaning away. Right now, it’s escaping the closing single quote and treating it as a literal single quote. You need to escape it with itself to insert a literal backslash:

def removebackslash(source):
    while(source.find('\\') != -1):
        startback = source.find('\\')
        endback = source[startback:].find(' ') + startback + 1
        source = source[0:startback] + source[endback:]
    return source