How can I print literal curly-brace characters in python string and also use .format on it?

Question

x = \" \\{ Hello \\} {0} \"
print(x.format(42))

gives me : Key Error: Hello\\\\

I want to print the output: {Hello} 42

Answer 1

Try this:

x = "{{ Hello }} {0}"

Answer 2

If you need to keep two curly braces in the string, you need 5 curly braces on each side of the variable.

>>> myvar = 'test'
>>> "{{{{{0}}}}}".format(myvar)
'{{test}}'

Answer 3

I stumbled upon this problem when trying to print text, which I can copy paste into a Latex document. I extend on this answer and make use of named replacement fields:

Lets say you want to print out a product of mulitple variables with indices such as , which in Latex would be $A_{ 0042 }*A_{ 3141 }*A_{ 2718 }*A_{ 0042 }$ The following code does the job with named fields so that for many indices it stays readable:

idx_mapping = {'i1':42, 'i2':3141, 'i3':2178 }
print('$A_{{ {i1:04d} }} * A_{{ {i2:04d} }} * A_{{ {i3:04d} }} * A_{{ {i1:04d} }}$'.format(**idx_mapping))

Answer 4

If you are going to be doing this a lot, it might be good to define a utility function that will let you use arbitrary brace substitutes instead, like

def custom_format(string, brackets, *args, **kwargs):
    if len(brackets) != 2:
        raise ValueError('Expected two brackets. Got {}.'.format(len(brackets)))
    padded = string.replace('{', '{{').replace('}', '}}')
    substituted = padded.replace(brackets[0], '{').replace(brackets[1], '}')
    formatted = substituted.format(*args, **kwargs)
    return formatted

>>> custom_format('{{[cmd]} process 1}', brackets='[]', cmd='firefox.exe')
'{{firefox.exe} process 1}'

Note that this will work either with brackets being a string of length 2 or an iterable of two strings (for multi-character delimiters).