Question

The following code:

key = open("C:\Scripts\private.ppk",'rb').read()

reads the file and assigns its data to the var key.

For a reason, backslashes are multiplied in the process. How can I make sure they don’t get multiplied?

Answer 1

You … don’t. They are escaped when they are read in so that they will process properly when they are written out / used. If you’re declaring strings and don’t want to double up the back slashes you can use raw strings r'c:\myfile.txt', but that doesn’t really apply to the contents of a file you’re reading in.

>>> s = r'c:\boot.ini'
>>> s
'c:\\boot.ini'
>>> repr(s)
"'c:\\\\boot.ini'"
>>> print s
c:\boot.ini
>>>

As you can see, the extra slashes are stored internally, but when you use the value in a print statement (write a file, test for values, etc.) they’re evaluated properly.