newb question on strings

[regex_jedi]

ok, I have looked a lot of places, and can't seem to get a clear
answer...

I have a string called
   each_theme

Some values of the string may contain a single quote as in -
   Happy
   Sad
   Nice
   Frank's Laundry
   Explosion

Notice that the 4th value has a single quote in it. Well, I need to
make sure that the single quote is escaped before handing it off for
further processing to a class I later call for some other processing.

So I thought, no big deal, I should be able to find a way to escape
the single quote on the string.  I am a perl and PHP guy, so I do a
lot of regex stuff.  I did a quick search and found someone had said
to use this re.sub function, so I tried.  But the following doesn't
work. To be honest, I am a little lost with all the modules and
classes required to do simple math or string functions in Python.
None of it seems built it in.. its all import modules...  Here is what
I am trying...

        # escape single quotes in theme name
        re.sub('''(['"])''', r'\\\1', each_theme)

you python masters... show me the way please...

thanks
regex_jedi