How can I include special characters (tab, newline) in a python doctest result string?

Question

Given the following python script:

# dedupe.py
import re

def dedupe_whitespace(s,spacechars=\'\\t \'):
    \"\"\"Merge repeated whitespace characters.
    Examp         


        

Answer 1

I've gotten this to work using literal string notation for the docstring:

def join_with_tab(iterable):
    r"""
    >>> join_with_tab(['1', '2'])
    '1\t2'
    """

    return '\t'.join(iterable)

if __name__ == "__main__":
    import doctest
    doctest.testmod()