8

I've checked this solution but it doesn't work in python3.

I've an escaped string of this kind: str = "Hello\\nWorld" and I want to obtain the same string unescaped: str_out = Hello\nWorld

I tried with this without succes: AttributeError: 'str' object has no attribute 'decode'

Here my sample code: 

str = "Hello\\nWorld"
str.decode('unicode_escape')
Timmy
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1 Answers1

18

decode applies to bytes, which you can create by encoding from your string.

I would encode (using default) then decode with unicode-escape

>>> s = "Hello\\nWorld"
>>> s.encode()
b'Hello\\nWorld'
>>> s.encode().decode("unicode-escape")
'Hello\nWorld'
>>> print(s.encode().decode("unicode-escape"))
Hello
World
>>>
Jean-François Fabre
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  • This doesn't cut it when your string contains non-ascii characters. Encoding to `latin1` in the interim seems to work though, see https://stackoverflow.com/a/58829514/791713. – Niklas R Mar 09 '23 at 23:25