Escape Characters

The backslash changes the next character

Some characters cannot be typed directly into a string. A backslash starts an escape sequence that stands in for one:

print("first\nsecond")
print("name\tage")

first
second
name	age

The ones worth knowing

print("a\\b")
print("she said \"hi\"")
print("\u00e9 \u2713")

a\b
she said "hi"
é ✓

Usually you can avoid escaping quotes

Since both quote styles work, pick the one you are not using inside:

print('she said "hi"')
print("it's fine")

she said "hi"
it's fine

repr shows the escapes

print() shows what the string means; repr() shows how you would write it. When a value looks right but behaves oddly, repr() is the first thing to reach for:

value = "line\twith\ttabs\n"
print(value)
print(repr(value))

line	with	tabs

'line\twith\ttabs\n'

Raw strings

Prefix with r and backslashes stay literal. This matters most for Windows paths and for regular expressions, which have their own backslash rules:

print(r"C:\temp\new\table.csv")
print("C:\temp\new\table.csv")

C:\temp\new\table.csv
C:	emp
ew	able.csv

The second line is what happens without the r: \t became a tab and \n became a newline, in the middle of a path.

Escapes in regular expressions

This is the main reason raw strings exist. A regex pattern often needs a literal backslash, and writing it without r means escaping every one twice:

import re
print(re.findall(r"\d+", "a1 b22 c333"))

['1', '22', '333']

Line continuation

A backslash at the very end of a line joins it to the next. Brackets do the same job more safely, so this is rare:

total = 1 + \
        2
print(total)

3