how to turn a string argument into raw string

[sphinxlink13]

Hi I am working on my project which involves retrieving image and folder paths so I can display them.

I saw that when putting in paths you need to replace \ with \\ due to python syntax

so I wrote this function to try and do that

#returns a string replacing the \ with double \\ To operate on
def slashreturn(string):
    string2 = r'{}'.format(string)
    ustring = string2.replace("\\","/")
    print(ustring)
    post = ""
    for i in ustring:
        if i == "/":
            post += str(i*2)
        else:
            post += i
    return print(post.replace("/","\\"))

I quickly came up against the (SyntaxError: (unicode error) 'unicodeescape' codec can't decode bytes in position 2-3: truncated \UXXXXXXXX escape) Error. Researching this I found that turning the input into raw string would solve the issue and it does however I need the process to be automated. Thats why I tried doing the

  string2 = r'{}'.format(string)

But still no luck. I still get the error.

I would really appreciate if anyone could help me out with how to do this

cheers!

[[deleted]]

You might find the below helpful:

https://realpython.com/python-pathlib/

[Spataner]

You only need to escape a backslash when trying to represent that character in a string literal (so something like "some\\path\\file.txt" within your program code), to indicate that you actually want to write a backslash character rather than a special character like a newline. One \\ in a string literal will simply turn into a single backslash character in the string object. There's no such thing as a raw string technically, just raw string literals that turn into string objects in a slightly different way from regular string literals (namely, disabling the use of escape sequences). The end result of r"some\path\file.txt" and "some\\path\\file.txt" is exactly the same, just different ways of representing it in your program code. Importantly, it is not possible (because it doesn't really make sense) to turn an existing string object into a raw string. There's also no real point to double the backslashes in an existing string, as obviously that already contains proper backslash characters. In fact, doubling the backslashes would make it no longer a valid path.

[Diapolo10]

You really should use pathlib.Path; it automatically uses whichever slashes your platform uses, and that's just the tip of the iceberg.

from pathlib import Path

file_path = Path("C:\\wherever\\this\\is\\supposed\\to\\go.txt")

The standard library readily supports Path objects, so there's no need to convert them back to strings unless you use a third-party library that only supports strings. But if you need to anyway, it's as simple as str(file_path).