[Tutor] escaping slashes in filenames..

[Glen Wheeler]

(just cc-ing this to the tutor list)
>
>Hi Glen!
>

Hi :)

>Message text written by "Glen Wheeler"
>>which is tedious
>and evil</assumption>.<
>
>on the dot, actually a search and replace works, but it fails when it
>encounters substrings with "escaped like characters" example:
>
>C:\good\image.jpg # this works
>
>c:\bad\image.jpg # this does´nt because Python thinks beforehand that a
>'\b' charater is in the string. this follows for  other escaped charaters
>too.
>
>Using raw strings is not an option because the list of paths are generated
>dynamically. I would have loved to turn them all into raw strings and write
>them back in the list but all my functions failed.

  Alright, then perhaps the function in question needs a look at.  For
example, say your generating the path using a script like this...

------------
## generate a random path made up of a C: at the start, and a variable
number of directories made up of upper and lowercase letters
import string, random
def makepath():
    path = r'C:'           ## not sure if this is important, but I did it
anyway
    somechars = list(string.letters)
    slashes = range(int(random.random()*9))   ## perhaps this should be a
bigger number
    for x in slashes:
     for y in range(int(random.random()*27)): ## same here
      l = random.choice(somechars)
      path = path + l
     if x != slashes[-1]:
      path = path + '\\'   ## this is crucial
     else:
      return path
apath = makepath()
print apath
------------(could contain errors...  I'm tired, didn't check it... :)

  Now that I've written that.... it would be better to use
random.choice([1,2,3,4,5,6,7]) for the directory names...bah, it's not meant
to be useful, just illustrate how you would pre-escape a generated path.
  If you are using a built-in function to get the path, it should already be
a string with escaped backslashes.  If not, I hope we can help you modify
your existing function to return nice useable paths :)

  Glen.