Printing a literal python string in octal

Question

For reasons unknown I am the consumer of metadata that needs to be displayed in octal format to be used. I am trying to figure out how to represent it as an octal. Example:

x = "\n)\n\022foobar"
print x 

)
foobar

print repr(x)
'\n)\n\x12foobar'

how do i get x to print the way it was assigned, which is in octal encoding?

Answer 1

You can't; that representation is lost. If you want to output "\\022" then you need to either process it yourself or you need to store "\\\\022" instead.