Question

The strings I want to match includes some escape sequences, like ‘It\’s something’. It’s no problem to match it with ‘.*?’, however the result is escaped automatically. How to prevent the automatic escaping, and keep the backslashes as they are?

For example:

>>> re.findall('\((?P<content>.*?)\)','(It\'s something)')
["It's something"]

And what I want is:

[r"It\'s something"]

Answer 1

There is no backslash in your input string.

>>> re.findall('\((?P<content>.*?)\)', r'(It\'s something)')
["It\\'s something"]
>>> ["It\\'s something"] == [r"It\'s something"]
True