5.6) Special Characters

A string can be made of any characters, but some characters can have special meanings for Python. To control this behaviour, we use a backslash ('\') to change the meaning of the following character in a string.

Here is a list of some important backslash-sequences in Python:

For example:

>>> print "This string\nhas two lines"
>>> print "c:\\users\\tom"

If you forgot to double the backslashes, '\t' would be printed as a tab.

If you have lots of special characters in a string, for example lots of backslashes in the location of a file on a computer (c:\users\tom), you can create a 'raw' string. This is simply preceded by the letter r, and all characters have their regular meaning:

>>> print r"c:\users\tom"

This time the backslash characters are treated as ordinary backslashes, and you can't include special characters like tabs, new lines or double quotation marks.

Write a program that uses all of these special characters and a raw string. See what happens if you mix double and single quotation marks in a string.