Split string by escape character

Question

I'm trying to split a string by the escape character in Python.

This is the way I've been trying to do it:

s = "C:\Users\as\Desktop\Data\pdf\txt\RTX_IDS_1DYS_20170610_0000_220279611-650000624200.txt"

s.encode("string_escape").split("\\")

When I run it, I get the following error:

s = "C:\Users\as\Desktop\Data\pdf\txt\RTX_IDS_1DYS_20170610_0000_220279611-650000624200.txt"

       ^

SyntaxError: (unicode error) 'unicodeescape' codec can't decode bytes in position 2-3: truncated \UXXXXXXXX escape

Answer 1

You can prefix your string with r so that python will treat that string as a raw string and take the backslashes '\' as literal backslashes and not escape characters. Like this:

s = r"C:\Users\as\Desktop\Data\pdf\txt\RTX_IDS_1DYS_20170610_0000_220279611-650000624200.txt"

parts = s.split("\\")

print(parts)