simple string question

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Mon, 07 Sep 2009 01:54:09 -0700, Niklas Norrthon wrote:

> Others have answered how to replace '\\n' with '\n'. For a more general
> approach which will handle all string escape sequences allowed in python
> (including '\xdd' and similar), python's eval can be used:

eval can do so much more than handle escape sequences:


quoted_string = ') or __import__("os").system("echo \'Pwn3d\';#rm -rf /"'
print eval('str(%s)' % quoted_string)

Every (bad) programmer should pass untrusted strings to eval as a quick 
and unsafe way to do trivial transformations.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_injection



-- 
Steven