从字符串中删除反斜杠

Question

I have a string that is a sentence like I don't want it, there'll be others

So the text looks like this I don\\'t want it, there\\'ll be other

for some reason a \\ comes with the text next to the ' . It was read in from another source. I want to remove it, but can't. I've tried. sentence.replace("\\'","'")

sentence.replace(r"\\'","'")

sentence.replace("\\\\","")

sentence.replace(r"\\\\","")

sentence.replace(r"\\\\\\\\","")

I know the \\ is to escape something, so not sure how to do it with the quotes

Answer 1

The \\ is just there to escape the ' character. It is only visible in the representation ( repr ) of the string, it's not actually a character in the string. See the following demo

>>> repr("I don't want it, there'll be others")
'"I don\'t want it, there\'ll be others"'

>>> print("I don't want it, there'll be others")
I don't want it, there'll be others

Answer 2

Try to use:

sentence.replace("\\", "")

You need two backslashes because first of them act as escape symbol, and second is symbol that you need to replace.

Answer 3

It is better to use regular expression to remove backslash:

>>> re.sub(u"u\005c'", r"'", "I don\'t want it, there\'ll be other")
"I don't want it, there'll be other"

Answer 4

If your text comes from crawled text and you didn't clean it up by unescaping before you process it with NLP tools, then you could easily unescape the HTML markups, eg:

In python2.x :

>>> import sys; sys.version
'2.7.6 (default, Jun 22 2015, 17:58:13) \n[GCC 4.8.2]'
>>> import HTMLParser
>>> txt = """I don\'t want it, there\'ll be other"""
>>> HTMLParser.HTMLParser().unescape(txt)
"I don't want it, there'll be other"

In python3 :

>>> import sys; sys.version
'3.4.0 (default, Jun 19 2015, 14:20:21) \n[GCC 4.8.2]'
>>> import html
>>> txt = """I don\'t want it, there\'ll be other"""
>>> html.unescape(txt)
"I don't want it, there'll be other"

See also: How do I unescape HTML entities in a string in Python 3.1?