how to replace back slash character with empty string in python

I am trying replace a backslash ‘’ in a string with the following code

string = "<P style='TEXT-INDENT'>B7 </P>"

result = string.replace("",'')

result:

------------------------------------------------------------
   File "<ipython console>", line 1
     result = string.replace("",'')
                                     ^
SyntaxError: EOL while scanning string literal

Here i don’t need the back slashes because actually i am parsing an xml file which has a tag in the above format, so if backslashes are there it is displaying invalid token during parsing

Can i know how to replace the backslashes with empty string in python

Answers:

Thank you for visiting the Q&A section on Magenaut. Please note that all the answers may not help you solve the issue immediately. So please treat them as advisements. If you found the post helpful (or not), leave a comment & I’ll get back to you as soon as possible.

Method 1

result = string.replace("\","")

Method 2

The error is because you did not add a escape character to your '', you should give \ for backslash ()

In [147]: foo = "acd" # example string with backslashes

In [148]: foo 
Out[148]: 'a\c\d'

In [149]: foo.replace('\', " ")
Out[149]: 'a c d'

In [150]: foo.replace('\', "")
Out[150]: 'acd'

Method 3

Just to give you an explanation: the backslash has a special meaning in many languages. In Python, taking from the doc:

The backslash () character is used to escape characters that otherwise have a special meaning, such as newline, backslash itself, or the quote character.

So, in order to replace in a string, you need to escape the backslash itself using "\"

>>> "this is a  I want to replace".replace("\", "?")
'this is a ? I want to replace'

Method 4

>>> string = "<P style='TEXT-INDENT'>B7 </P>"
>>> result = string.replace("\",'')
>>> result
"<P style='TEXT-INDENT'>B7 </P>"

Method 5

Adding a solution if string='abcdnop.png'

result = string.replace("\","")

This above won’t work as it’ll give result='abcdnop.png'.

Here if you see n is a newline character. So we have to replace backslah char in raw string(as there ‘n’ won’t be detected)

string.encode('unicode_escape')
result = string.replace("\", "")
#result=abcdnop.png

Method 6

import re

new_string = re.sub(r"\\",r" ",old_string)

Method 7

You need to escape ‘’ with one extra backslash to compare actually with .. So you should use ‘’..

See Python Documentation – section 2.4 for all the escape sequences in Python.. And how you should handle them..

Method 8

It’s August 2020.
Python 3.8.1
Pandas 1.1.0
At this point in time I used both the double backslash AND the r.

df.replace([r'\'], [''], regex=True, inplace=True)

Cheers.

All methods was sourced from stackoverflow.com or stackexchange.com, is licensed under cc by-sa 2.5, cc by-sa 3.0 and cc by-sa 4.0