Passing meta-characters to Python as arguments from command line

Question

I\'m making a Python program that will parse the fields in some input lines. I\'d like to let the user enter the field separator as an option from the command line. I\'m usi

Answer 1

solving it from within your script:

options.delimiter = re.sub("\\\\t","\t",options.delimiter)

you can adapt the re about to match more escaped chars (\n, \r, etc)

another way to solve the problem outside python:

when you call your script from shell, do it like this:

parseme.py -f input.txt -d '^V'

^V means "press Ctrl+V"

then press the normal tab key

this will properly pass the tab character to your python script;