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 got it to work by escaping the tab character in the expected string:

>>> function_that_returns_tabbed_text()
'\\t\\t\\tsometext\\t\\t'

instead of

>>> function_that_returns_tabbed_text()
\t\t\tsometext\t\t