Escapeism

[Frederic Rentsch]

Kay Schluehr wrote:
> Sybren Stuvel wrote:
>   
>> Kay Schluehr enlightened us with:
>>     
>>> Usually I struggle a short while with \ and either succeed or give up.
>>> Today I'm in a different mood and don't give up. So here is my
>>> question:
>>>
>>> You have an unknown character string c such as '\n' , '\a' , '\7' etc.
>>>
>>> How do you echo them using print?
>>>
>>> print_str( c ) prints representation '\a' to stdout for c = '\a'
>>> print_str( c ) prints representation '\n' for c = '\n'
>>> ...
>>>
>>> It is required that not a beep or a linebreak shall be printed.
>>>       
>> try "print repr(c)".
>>     
>
> This yields the hexadecimal representation of the ASCII character and
> does not simply echo the keystrokes '\' and 'a' for '\a' ignoring the
> escape semantics. One way to achieve this naturally is by prefixing
> '\a' with r where r'\a' indicates a "raw" string. But unfortunately
> "rawrification" applies only to string literals and not to string
> objects ( such as c ). I consider creating a table consisting of pairs
> {'\0': r'\0','\1': r'\1',...}  i.e. a handcrafted mapping but maybe
> I've overlooked some simple function or trick that does the same for
> me.
>
> Kay
>
>   
Kay,

This is perhaps yet another case for SE? I don't really know, because I 
don't quite get what you're after. See for yourself:

 >>> import SE
 >>> Printabilizer = SE.SE ( '''
   (1)=\\1   # All 256 octets can be written as parenthesized ascii
   (2)=\\2
   "\a=\\a"  # (7)=\\a"
   "\n=\\n"  # or (10)=\\n  or (10)=LF or whatever
   "\r=\\r"  # (13)=CR
   "\f=\\f"
   "\v=\\v"
   # Add whatever other ones you like
   #    and translate them to anything you like.
 ''')

 >>> print Printabilizer ('abd\aefg\r\nhijk\vlmnop\1\2.')
abd\aefg\r\nhijk\vlmno\1\2. 
  

If you think this may help, you'll find SE here: 
http://cheeseshop.python.org/pypi/SE/2.2%20beta


Regards

Frederic