Python: Reading file: Prevent escaping special character

Question

I'm reading from a file which contains: this is the first line\\n this is the second line\\n\\nAnother line

I'm trying to read this file and keeping the special characters \\n as they are.

with open(r'test.txt') as f:
    c = f.read()

But printing c shows always:

this is the first line\\\\n this is the second line\\\\n\\\\nAnother line

I've tried without prefixing with r in r'text.txt' but it doesn't change anything.

Is it possible to prevent escaping the special character \\n ?

I could do a str.replace('\\\\n','\\n') of course, but I was just wondering whether we could do without this extra step.

Answer 1

I see 2 scenarios:

1. You are reading it on windows in text mode using Python 2. Windows is using \\r\\n and Python 2 in text mode is thus expecting \\r\\n . You should enable universal newline mode by adding U , open('file.txt', 'rU') . You can also use io.open instead of open . I don't have Python 2 so I haven't tried it...

2. You literally have two characters \\ and n in your file and not a newline in which case everything is behaving as expected.