Urgent: "\" in strings?

[Nick Bower]

I'm messing with PIL, and the only way I can see to get a palette out of
an image returns a string such as:

'\000\000\001\002' etc

which is not that weird until you do a s[0] and it returns:

'\000' instead of '\

How do I convert this string to numbers?

PS - Sorry about the urgency - got a presentation tomorrow and this is
the final link in getting my demo working. :(