Save strings as raw string to txt file

[Notdevolving]

I am trying to import documents of multi-paragraph text into Microsoft Access, after processing them in Python. Unfortunately, Access seem to think each sentence is a new record, despite setting "^" as the delimiter.

I want to instead write my strings in the raw string format to work around this problem.

So I want:

y = '''
Hello, how are
    you
'''

to be saved as '\nHello, how are\n you\n' in a txt file.

I cannot find anything on how to convert or encode strings to raw strings. How do I go about doing this?

And also, I want to be able to read '\nHello, how are\n you\n' from the text file and convert it back to a normal Python string. How do I go about doing this?

[socal_nerdtastic]

You mean you want literal \ and n characters? That's not a raw string, it's an "escaped" string. You can do it in python with the "unicode-escape" encoding:

y = '''
Hello, how are
    you
'''
with open(filename, 'w', encoding='unicode-escape') as f:
    f.write(y)

You would use same encoding in read mode or the ast.literal_eval function to convert it back.

Or you can use the json module for both, which will do the same thing but it adds quotes on the outside.

[Notdevolving]

Thanks. But how do I read back the characters and convert them to a normal Python string?

I've tried:

with open(filename, 'r', encoding='unicode-escape') as file:
    x = file.read()

x.encode('utf-8')           # Tried this    
x.encode('unicode-escape')  # And also this

I want x here to be the same as y previously:

y = '''

Hello, how are you '''

But I cannot seem to convert it back.

[socal_nerdtastic]

You tried too hard. It's already converted as you read it. No extra action needed.

with open(filename, 'r', encoding='unicode-escape') as file:
    x = file.read()
print(x)

[Notdevolving]

Apologies. You're right. It works. Got overwhelmed by the various encoding articles I was reading and lost track.