[Tutor] escaping slashes in filenames..

[Daniel Yoo]

On Thu, 10 May 2001, Sharriff Aina wrote:

> aa =3D 'c:\ten\ten\ten\ten.jpg
> aa2 =3D string.replace(aa, '\t', '\\')  # this results in
> 'c:\\en\\en\\en\\en.jpg'
> aa3 =3D string.replace(aa,'\', '\\\\') # 'c:\\\\en\\\\......
>=20
> My question is: how do I notify Python that the slashes are part of a
> filename and not an escaped character? using r'c:\test'; raw string  is n=
ot


You can double up the backslashes.  An escaped backslash is a backslash. =
=20
Er, what I mean is:

###
>>> backslash =3D '\\'
>>> backslash
'\\'
>>> print backslash
\
###

So one way to write out your path would be:

    aa =3D 'c:\\ten\\ten\\ten\\ten.jpg

which would avoid the problem of accidently escaping the t's into tab
characters.


> filename and not an escaped character? using r'c:\test'; raw string  is n=
ot
> an option because I=B4ve got to take care of a bunch of filenames in a li=
st
> or Tuple

I'm not quite sure I understand; can you show us what prevents the use of
raw strings?  Perhaps there might be a way to get it to work.

For example, as long as there aren't any spaces in your filenames, you
could do something like:

###
long_list =3D r'''c:\test.txt,
                c:\arm\and\a\leg.txt
                c:\one\ring\to\rule\them\all.com'''.split()
###

which has the nice effect of using the split to break it into a 3-element
list.  This is almost equivalent to Perl's "quoteword" function qw().


Hope this helps!