Translate escaped characters in a string

[Josiah Carlson]

> I have an application that reads the arguments sent to the script. If
> an user enters a text like "Line 1\nLine2" (\n is slash+n, and not
> LF), I would like to use \n and other supported escape sequences when
> I write the text to a file.
> 
> Is there a way to do this, other than writing my own parser?

I know there's an easier way to do it, but the below works...
 >>> import encodings
 >>> print encodings.codecs.escape_decode('hello\\nworld')[0]
hello
world
 >>>

If the stings are escaped normally, the above will produce what you want.

  - Josiah