encoding and decoding repr'd version of strings

[Daniel Parisien]

Hi 
is there an codec that bundles with python so you can transform strings 
into the repr'd (escaped) version and back? If not, how easy would it be to 
code? I don't want to use eval(...) because I don't trust the source of the 
string and I might mistakenly eval an expression like "' '*(2**30)" which 
would allocate about 1 GB of data (eek!)

Thanks,
Dan