remove shell escape characters from a string

Question

I am creating a terminal based python application whereby the user drags and drops a csv file into the terminal to get the file path. The file path is therefore escaped.

How do I remove all instances of this?

For example, I have a file

thisisatestfile/\(2).csv

but when I drag it into terminal it appears as:

thisisatestfile\:\\\(2\).csv

I have a list of all the shell escape characters that I need to remove: link to characters

I am not very good at regex so any help much appreciated!

Maybe you should use the [`shlex`](https://docs.python.org/2/library/shlex.html) module to parse the input. — Barmar, Oct 16 '19 at 18:38
Create a dictionary that maps each of the escape sequences to the corresponding replacement. Then use `re.sub()` to replace them all. — Barmar, Oct 16 '19 at 18:42
@Barmar you can use the shlex library in python 2.7.10 therefore am using this. Thank you for your help. — Itergator, Oct 16 '19 at 19:10

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Jul 03 '22 at 18:34

I just implemented this with shlex.split

>>> shlex.split('thisisatestfile/\(2).csv')
['thisisatestfile/(2).csv']

Since this method is intended for taking a raw shell invocation and returning a list of args to be passed to, e.g., subprocess.Popen, it returns a list. If you know you only have a single string to process, just grab the first element of the returned list.

>>> shlex.split('thisisatestfile/\(2).csv')[0]
'thisisatestfile/(2).csv'

remove shell escape characters from a string

1 Answers1