There are two ways to go about replacing \\ with \ or unescaping backslash escaped strings in Python. First is using literal_eval to evaluate the string. Note that in this method you need to surround the string in another layer of quotes. For example:
>>> import ast >>> a = '"Hello,\\nworld"' >>> print ast.literal_eval(a) Hello, world
Another way is to use the decode('string_escape') method from the string class. For example,
>>> print "Hello,\\nworld".decode('string_escape') Hello, world