convert string to raw string?

[Steven Bethard]

Duncan Booth wrote:
> If you are getting input from the user, then unless you are doing some 
> processing on it to interpret escape sequences the chances are you already 
> have what you need to use as a regular expression. If you *are* 
> interpreting escape sequences then the answer is you need to not do that 
> since the operation isn't really reversible.

If you are interpreting escape sequences, you probably want 
string.decode or string.encode:

 >>> '\\n\\r'.decode('string_escape')
'\n\r'
 >>> '\n\r'.encode('string_escape')
'\\n\\r'

Steve