CODEWITHSUNDEEP
pythonescaping
Sfrow
Sfrow

Reputation: 421

Correctly escaping backslash in python

I know, it's probably a super easy problem with tons of answers here. I tried to read around but I can't find a solution to this.

I know that the backslash \ is a special character and that to escape it, I need to double it like \\.

I want to create a string with a file name pointing to a different folder, something like fld\filename.mat. But this string is a concatenation of the filename given by a var_filename with the folder name and the file extension as strings. I then use this variable to load a file into python.

I tried var = 'fld\\' + var_filename + '.mat' but then, when I try to use it to load the file, it tells me it cannot find fld\\filename.mat.

While of course if I try var = 'fld\' + var_filename + '.mat', it gives me an end-of-line error EOL while scanning string literal because I believe \' it's seen as the escape for the '.

Thanks for your help

Upvotes: 0

Views: 1450

Answers (2)

Xiokraze
Xiokraze

Reputation: 381

Since you have multiple variables with different parts of the path, you can concatenate them all into one.

parent_folder = "parent_folder"
folder = "folder"
name = "file"
ext = ".py"
path = parent_folder + "\\" + folder + "\\" + name + ext
print(path)

Upvotes: 0

BramAppel
BramAppel

Reputation: 1366

This might be useful for your problem, concatenation is safe and you can check whether the specific file exists.

import os

filename = 'filename'
ext = '.txt'
folder = 'folder

var = os.path.join(folder, filename + ext)
exists = os.path.isfile(var)

Upvotes: 2

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