How to Escape Characters in a Python String?

How to Escape Characters in a Python String?

Regex symbols do have a special meaning in Python. And often during printing the text as per our needs, it becomes strenuous work to let the compiler comprehend that we need to filter a text without considering the special meaning of the regex symbols.

Regex symbols can be anything like square brackets ([ ]), a dot ( . ), an asterisk ( * ), etc. So, what's the upshot ? There are alternatives to escape the special meaning of these symbols. We'll use escape string Python.

Here's a list of some of the regex symbols with their special meanings :

However, we need to have an insight into what happens when we don't avoid the special meaning of the characters in a string. The given example shows it well when we are trying to get the content mentioned inside brackets in a string object.

Output :

But, it was supposed to provide only the content inside brackets, i.e. without using any alternatives. Since brackets have their special meaning , the re.findall() function considered the string object as a whole inside the brackets and returned the same.

What we need to need is to just remove the special meaning of brackets while passing the argument in the re.findall() function.

Output :

Of all the alternatives to be discussed to escape string Python, what's needed is the use of a backslash inside the string along with regex symbols to avoid their special meaning. So, to avoid special meanings, we need to escape them with \ like \. or \-.

Let's look at the following three methods to put a backslash to remove the special meanings from a string.

Method 1: Using re.escape()

The easiest way to avoid special meanings of the characters is the use of the re.escape() method which takes the pattern as an argument and returns the same with a double backslash before each of the regex symbols, be it a dot, an asterisk, square brackets, etc.

Below is the Python code making use of re.escape() :

Code:

Output:

escape\-string\-python\ with\ re\.escape\(\)

You may notice that the printed string is different here from its representation. The representation of the string contains double backslashes everywhere while there are single backslashes in the printed string. This is because the __repr()__ function is used to represent a string where a backslash is represented by \\ since it's an escape character.

Method 2 : Using String Translate Table

Another way to escape string in Python is by using a translate table that returns a translated string based on the character translations that we define inside the table. The table comprises an object (dict objects) where each of the character definitions is mapped to their character translations. Therefore, the special characters in the entire string will be converted to their respective character changes given in the table.

And in the table, we have just added a single backslash with each character and mapped them to their original characters given in the table. Since we need to define this function, we'll name it translate_table.

It internally uses the str.maketrans() function that returns a mapping table that will be used by the str.translate() function that will finally replace the specified characters with their mapped values in the table.

The translate table will be defined in this manner :

We shall look at an example where a string with the regex symbols will be replaced with a backslash before each of the regex symbols.

Code:

Output:

escape\-string\-python with translate\-table

]

Method 3: Using Backlash

Finally, in a general scenario where we don't need to work with huge string objects and just some small inputs, then it's easy to provide a backslash to escape any special character.

Define a string that has special characters but without the backslash.

Code:

Output :

There is a syntax error in the output. As mentioned earlier in the article, special characters have meaning in Python. But these characters can still be used without their special meanings, just with a backslash before each one of them.

Code:

Output :

Examples for Understanding

Consider another example to properly understand the escaping of special characters in Python. We'll use both the re.escape() function and the string translate table to return a modified string with a backslash.

Here's the string object that will be used in further examples.

Using re.escape()

Using String Translate Table

Output :

Learn More

Here's a lot more to learn more about String and modules in Python :

• Strings in Python
• String Slicing in Python
• String Methods Python
• Python Modules
• Packages in Python and Import Statement
• Regular Expression in Python