raw string

[Marc Petitmermet]

I can do the following replacement:

r"kr\xdf6;ger".replace('\\','&#')
-> 'kr෶ger'

But how can I do this using a variable which contains the above string? 
Obviously, the following code returns not the string with replacement 
but the name of the variable itself:

name = "kr\xdf6;ger"
r"name".replace('\\','&#')
-> 'r"name"

Sorry, if this is a stupid question but I have not found an answer so 
far (or I have been using the wrong keywords for searching).

Thanks for any help.
Regards,
Marc