Question

Is there a python equivalent to echo -e?

In other words, is there a built-in function to convert r"\x50\x79\x74\x68\x6f\x6e" to "Python" in Python?

Edit
I added the ‘r’ prefix, to make sure everyone understands that I do not want the python interpreter to convert this. Rather, I want to convert that 24-character string to a 6-character one.

Answer 1

The correct way to do this, which I just found is

>>> a = r"\x50\x79\x74\x68\x6f\x6e"
>>> print a
\x50\x79\x74\x68\x6f\x6e
>>> a.decode('string_escape')
'Python'

Make sure you are escaping the backslashes (or using the raw ‘r’ prefix) when testing this!

References:

• http://docs.python.org/library/stdtypes.html#str.decode
• http://docs.python.org/library/codecs.html#standard-encodings