Python (json.load) to set value to a string missing escape characters

Question

I am parsing json file that has the following data subset.

"title": "Revert \"testcase for check\""

In my python script I do the following:

with open('%s/staging_area/pr_info.json' % cwd) as data_file:
                        pr_info = json.load(data_file)              
        pr_title=pr_info["title"]

pr_title will contain the following information after getting the title from json object.

Revert "testcase for check"

It seems that escape characters \ are not part of the string assignment. Is there any way to retain the entire string including escape characters? Thank you so much!

Answer 1

If you really need it, you should escape it again with json and remove first and last quote:

pr_title = json.dumps(pr_title)[1:-1]

but escape characters is for escaping, raw value of string is still Revert "testcase for check" . So escaping function will depend on where you data is applied (DB, HTML, XML, etc).

To explain [1:-1] , the dumps escapes raw string to be JSON-valid which adds \ and surrounds the string with quotation marks " . You have to remove these quotes from resulting string. Since Python could work with string same as list you can get all letters from second to penultimate with [1:-1] which literally removes the first and last quotes:

print(pr_title)                                                                                       
>>> "Revert \"testcase for check\""

print(pr_title[1:-1])                                                                                 
>>> Revert \"testcase for check\"

Answer 2

In case you really need to maintain the escape characters, you will have to escape the escape characters right after reading the file and before parsing the JSON.

with open('%s/staging_area/pr_info.json' % cwd) as data_file:
        raw_data_file = data_file.read().replace("\\", "\\\\\\")
        pr_info = json.JSONDecoder().decode(raw_data_file)

Then pr_title should still have the original escaped characters.

---

What is happening is:

1. Replace each single backslash for three backslashes: original escape character (\) + an escaped escape character (\\).
2. raw_data_file is now a string instead of a file pointer, so we cannot use json.load(). But the method decode from json.JSONDecoder admits a string input.
3. The decoder will parse the JSON string and remove the escaped escape character , while maintaining the original one from your file.

Answer 3

If your goal is to print pr_title, then you can probably use json.dumps() to print the original text.

>>> import json
>>> j = '{"name": "\"Bob\""}'
>>> print(j)
{"name": ""Bob""}
>>> json.dumps(j)
'"{\\"name\\": \\"\\"Bob\\"\\"}"'