CODEWITHSUNDEEP
pythonmacosnewline
Sherlock
Sherlock

Reputation: 5627

New line and tab characters in python on mac

I am printing a string to the python shell on a mac os 10.7.3.

The string contains new line characters, \n\r, and tabs, \t.

I'm not 100% sure what new line characters are used on each platform, however i've tried every combination (\n, \n\r, \r) and the newline characters are printed on the shell:

 'hello\n\r\tworld'

I don't know what i'm doing wrong, any help is appreciated.

Thanks

Upvotes: 0

Views: 4878

Answers (1)

Steven Rumbalski
Steven Rumbalski

Reputation: 45541

What look to you like newlines and carriage returns are actually two characters each -- a back slash plus a normal character.

Fix this by using your_string.decode('string_escape'):

>>> s = 'hello\\n\\r\\tworld'   # or s = r'hello\n\r\tworld'
>>> print s
hello\n\r\tworld
>>> print repr(s)
'hello\\n\\r\\tworld'
>>> print s.decode('string_escape')
hello
        world

Upvotes: 2

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