How to convert “\x09” back to tab

Question

I'm reading in a file from Python that has the line:

#separator \x09

How do I convert the \\x09 into a tab character (I'm going to later use this as a delimiter)?

Answer 1

>>> s = r'\x09'
>>> s.decode('unicode_escape')
u'\t'

Or, in Python 3.x (if you have a str rather than a bytes , because you can't decode a str ):

>>> s = r'\x09'
>>> s.encode('unicode_escape').decode('unicode_escape')
>>> '\t'

See Python Specific Encodings in the codecs docs for details.