On Wed, 2011-10-26 at 12:48 -0700, Ross Boylan wrote: > I want to replace every \ and " (the two characters for backslash and > double quotes) with a \ and the same character, i.e., > \ -> \\ > " -> \" I'd like to thank Ian, Dave, MRAB, and John for their helpful responses. I hadn't realized the interpreter was giving me the repr, and that differed from the str.
I've since found one other solution: email.utils.quote() does exactly the substitution I was looking for--not surprising, since I was doing it for email. Here's my little test program: #! /usr/bin/python import email, email.utils, re s0 = r'I am " a silly \quote' print s0 print re.sub(r'(\\|")', r'\\\1', s0) print email.utils.quote(s0) Output I am " a silly \quote I am \" a silly \\quote I am \" a silly \\quote Ross -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list