Raw strings to normal strings conversion?

[Nagarajan]

On Aug 23, 2:42 pm, Marc 'BlackJack' Rintsch <bj_... at gmx.net> wrote:
> On Thu, 23 Aug 2007 09:21:40 +0000, Nagarajan wrote:
> > On Aug 23, 1:21 pm, James Stroud <jstr... at mbi.ucla.edu> wrote:
> >> Nagarajan wrote:
> >> > Is there a way by which I could obtain normal string form of a raw
> >> > string.
> >> > XML CDATA is returned as raw string. But I need the string to actually
> >> > escape special chars.
>
> >> > Any idea?
>
> >> This doesn't seem clear. Perhaps an example of what you get and what you
> >> want it converted to.
>
> > Here is an example:
> >>> rawstr = r'a\nb'
> >>> print rawstr
> > a\nb
>
> > Now I need this newstr to actually interpret '\n', in other words, to
> > behave like a normal string.
>
> So you get a string with Newlines as two character sequence \n.  You don't
> get "raw" strings.  That is a concept in Python source code.  When the
> program is running there is no such distinction between "raw" and "normal"
> strings.  Here's a solution:
>
> In [87]: print r'a\nb'
> a\nb
>
> In [88]: print r'a\nb'.decode('string-escape')
> a
> b
>
> Ciao,
>         Marc 'BlackJack' Rintsch

Thanks a lot.