constructing binary \n

[Steven Arnold]

Is there a more elegant way to construct \[a-z] in a string than 
something like:

s = '\\n'
result = eval( "'%s'" ) % s

Another ugly method would be to build a dict with all the different 
special letters I want as keys, and their corresponding values as 
values.  Or I could have a huge if/elif structure.  I can't make ord 
work, because while ord( '\n' ) gives me a reasonable integer that I 
can interpolate with %c, I don't have '\n', I have '\\n'.

Is there a simple, graceful way to do this sort of translation?

steve