SyntaxError: (unicode error) 'unicodeescape' codec can't decode bytes in position 2-3: truncated \UXXXXXXXX escape

[zljubisicmob at gmail.com]

The script is very simple (abc.txt exists in ROOTDIR directory):

import os
import shutil

ROOTDIR = 'C:\Users\zoran'

file1 = os.path.join(ROOTDIR, 'abc.txt')
file2 = os.path.join(ROOTDIR, 'def.txt')

shutil.move(file1, file2)


But it returns the following error:


C:\Python34\python.exe C:/Users/bckslash_test.py
  File "C:/Users/bckslash_test.py", line 4
    ROOTDIR = 'C:\Users'
             ^
SyntaxError: (unicode error) 'unicodeescape' codec can't decode bytes in position 2-3: truncated \UXXXXXXXX escape

Process finished with exit code 1

As I saw, I could solve the problem by changing line 4 to (small letter "r" before string:
ROOTDIR = r'C:\Users\zoran'

but that is not an option for me because I am using configparser in order to read the ROOTDIR from underlying cfg file.

I need a mechanism to read the path string with single backslashes into a variable, but afterwards to escape every backslash in it. 

How to do that?