String replace with backslashes in Python
I'm trying to do a simple replacement of " " with "\s" (the literal \s, not some sort of backslash escape). This is what I think should happen: >>> 'asdf hjkl'.replace(' ', '\s') 'asdf\shjkl' I did this: >>> 'asdf hjkl'.replace(' ', '\s') 'asdf\\shjkl' >>> 'asdf hjkl'.replace(' ', '\\s') 'asdf\\shjkl' Neither returns what I expected, and I can't for the life of me understand what's going on. What input do I have to use to get my expected output? You're getting what you want. It just doesn't look that way in the REPL: >>> 'asdf hjkl'.replace(' ', '\s')[4] '\\' As you can see, that's one