Develop Reference

Concatenate string and list to create a list of paths [duplicate]

I would like to put an int into a string. This is what I am doing at the moment:
num = 40
plot.savefig('hanning40.pdf') #problem line
I have to run the program for several different numbers, so I'd like to do a loop. But inserting the variable like this doesn't work:
plot.savefig('hanning', num, '.pdf')
How do I insert a variable into a Python string?
See also
If you tried using + to concatenate a number with a string (or between strings, etc.) and got an error message, see How can I concatenate str and int objects?.
If you are trying to assemble a URL with variable data, do not use ordinary string formatting, because it is error-prone and more difficult than necessary. Specialized tools are available. See Add params to given URL in Python.
If you are trying to assemble a SQL query, do not use ordinary string formatting, because it is a major security risk. This is the cause of "SQL injection" which costs real companies huge amounts of money every year. See for example Python: best practice and securest way to connect to MySQL and execute queries for proper techniques.
If you just want to print (output) the string, you can prepare it this way first, or if you don't need the string for anything else, print each piece of the output individually using a single call to print. See How can I print multiple things (fixed text and/or variable values) on the same line, all at once? for details on both approaches.

Using f-strings:
plot.savefig(f'hanning{num}.pdf')
This was added in 3.6 and is the new preferred way.
Using str.format():
plot.savefig('hanning{0}.pdf'.format(num))
String concatenation:
plot.savefig('hanning' + str(num) + '.pdf')
Conversion Specifier:
plot.savefig('hanning%s.pdf' % num)
Using local variable names (neat trick):
plot.savefig('hanning%(num)s.pdf' % locals())
Using string.Template:
plot.savefig(string.Template('hanning${num}.pdf').substitute(locals()))
See also:
Fancier Output Formatting - The Python Tutorial
Python 3's f-Strings: An Improved String Formatting Syntax (Guide) - RealPython

With the introduction of formatted string literals ("f-strings" for short) in Python 3.6, it is now possible to write this with a briefer syntax:
>>> name = "Fred"
>>> f"He said his name is {name}."
'He said his name is Fred.'
With the example given in the question, it would look like this
plot.savefig(f'hanning{num}.pdf')

plot.savefig('hanning(%d).pdf' % num)
The % operator, when following a string, allows you to insert values into that string via format codes (the %d in this case). For more details, see the Python documentation:
printf-style String Formatting

You can use + as the normal string concatenation function as well as str().
"hello " + str(10) + " world" == "hello 10 world"

In general, you can create strings using:
stringExample = "someString " + str(someNumber)
print(stringExample)
plot.savefig(stringExample)

If you would want to put multiple values into the string you could make use of format
nums = [1,2,3]
plot.savefig('hanning{0}{1}{2}.pdf'.format(*nums))
Would result in the string hanning123.pdf. This can be done with any array.

Special cases
Depending on why variable data is being used with strings, the general-purpose approaches may not be appropriate.
If you need to prepare an SQL query
Do not use any of the usual techniques for assembling a string. Instead, use your SQL library's functionality for parameterized queries.
A query is code, so it should not be thought about like normal text. Using the library will make sure that any inserted text is properly escaped. If any part of the query could possibly come from outside the program in any way, that is an opportunity for a malevolent user to perform SQL injection. This is widely considered one of the important computer security problems, costing real companies huge amounts of money every year and causing problems for countless customers. Even if you think you know the data is "safe", there is no real upside to using any other approach.
The syntax will depend on the library you are using and is outside the scope of this answer.
If you need to prepare a URL query string
See Add params to given URL in Python. Do not do it yourself; there is no practical reason to make your life harder.
Writing to a file
While it's possible to prepare a string ahead of time, it may be simpler and more memory efficient to just write each piece of data with a separate .write call. Of course, non-strings will still need to be converted to string before writing, which may complicate the code. There is not a one-size-fits-all answer here, but choosing badly will generally not matter very much.
If you are simply calling print
The built-in print function accepts a variable number of arguments, and can take in any object and stringify it using str. Before trying string formatting, consider whether simply passing multiple arguments will do what you want. (You can also use the sep keyword argument to control spacing between the arguments.)
# display a filename, as an example
print('hanning', num, '.pdf', sep='')
Of course, there may be other reasons why it is useful for the program to assemble a string; so by all means do so where appropriate.
It's important to note that print is a special case. The only functions that work this way are ones that are explicitly written to work this way. For ordinary functions and methods, like input, or the savefig method of Matplotlib plots, we need to prepare a string ourselves.
Concatenation
Python supports using + between two strings, but not between strings and other types. To work around this, we need to convert other values to string explicitly: 'hanning' + str(num) + '.pdf'.
Template-based approaches
Most ways to solve the problem involve having some kind of "template" string that includes "placeholders" that show where information should be added, and then using some function or method to add the missing information.
f-strings
This is the recommended approach when possible. It looks like f'hanning{num}.pdf'. The names of variables to insert appear directly in the string. It is important to note that there is not actually such a thing as an "f-string"; it's not a separate type. Instead, Python will translate the code ahead of time:
>>> def example(num):
... return f'hanning{num}.pdf'
...
>>> import dis
>>> dis.dis(example)
2 0 LOAD_CONST 1 ('hanning')
2 LOAD_FAST 0 (num)
4 FORMAT_VALUE 0
6 LOAD_CONST 2 ('.pdf')
8 BUILD_STRING 3
10 RETURN_VALUE
Because it's a special syntax, it can access opcodes that aren't used in other approaches.
str.format
This is the recommended approach when f-strings aren't possible - mainly, because the template string needs to be prepared ahead of time and filled in later. It looks like 'hanning{}.pdf'.format(num), or 'hanning{num}.pdf'.format(num=num)'. Here, format is a method built in to strings, which can accept arguments either by position or keyword.
Particularly for str.format, it's useful to know that the built-in locals, globals and vars functions return dictionaries that map variable names to the contents of those variables. Thus, rather than something like '{a}{b}{c}'.format(a=a, b=b, c=c), we can use something like '{a}{b}{c}'.format(**locals()), unpacking the locals() dict.
str.format_map
This is a rare variation on .format. It looks like 'hanning{num}.pdf'.format_map({'num': num}). Rather than accepting keyword arguments, it accepts a single argument which is a mapping.
That probably doesn't sound very useful - after all, rather than 'hanning{num}.pdf'.format_map(my_dict), we could just as easily write 'hanning{num}.pdf'.format(**my_dict). However, this is useful for mappings that determine values on the fly, rather than ordinary dicts. In these cases, unpacking with ** might not work, because the set of keys might not be determined ahead of time; and trying to unpack keys based on the template is unwieldy (imagine: 'hanning{num}.pdf'.format(num=my_mapping[num]), with a separate argument for each placeholder).
string.Formatter
The string standard library module contains a rarely used Formatter class. Using it looks like string.Formatter().format('hanning{num}.pdf', num=num). The template string uses the same syntax again. This is obviously clunkier than just calling .format on the string; the motivation is to allow users to subclass Formatter to define a different syntax for the template string.
All of the above approaches use a common "formatting language" (although string.Formatter allows changing it); there are many other things that can be put inside the {}. Explaining how it works is beyond the scope of this answer; please consult the documentation. Do keep in mind that literal { and } characters need to be escaped by doubling them up. The syntax is presumably inspired by C#.
The % operator
This is a legacy way to solve the problem, inspired by C and C++. It has been discouraged for a long time, but is still supported. It looks like 'hanning%s.pdf' % num, for simple cases. As you'd expect, literal '%' symbols in the template need to be doubled up to escape them.
It has some issues:
It seems like the conversion specifier (the letter after the %) should match the type of whatever is being interpolated, but that's not actually the case. Instead, the value is converted to the specified type, and then to string from there. This isn't normally necessary; converting directly to string works most of the time, and converting to other types first doesn't help most of the rest of the time. So 's' is almost always used (unless you want the repr of the value, using 'r'). Despite that, the conversion specifier is a mandatory part of the syntax.
Tuples are handled specially: passing a tuple on the right-hand side is the way to provide multiple arguments. This is an ugly special case that's necessary because we aren't using function-call syntax. As a result, if you actually want to format a tuple into a single placeholder, it must be wrapped in a 1-tuple.
Other sequence types are not handled specially, and the different behaviour can be a gotcha.
string.Template
The string standard library module contains a rarely used Template class. Instances provide substitute and safe_substitute methods that work similarly to the built-in .format (safe_substitute will leave placeholders intact rather than raising an exception when the arguments don't match). This should also be considered a legacy approach to the problem.
It looks like string.Template('hanning$num.pdf').substitute(num=num), and is inspired by traditional Perl syntax. It's obviously clunkier than the .format approach, since a separate class has to be used before the method is available. Braces ({}) can be used optionally around the name of the variable, to avoid ambiguity. Similarly to the other methods, literal '$' in the template needs to be doubled up for escaping.

I had a need for an extended version of this: instead of embedding a single number in a string, I needed to generate a series of file names of the form 'file1.pdf', 'file2.pdf' etc. This is how it worked:
['file' + str(i) + '.pdf' for i in range(1,4)]

You can make dict and substitute variables in your string.
var = {"name": "Abdul Jalil", "age": 22}
temp_string = "My name is %(name)s. I am %(age)s years old." % var

How to convert a regular string to a raw string? [duplicate]

I have a string s, its contents are variable. How can I make it a raw string? I'm looking for something similar to the r'' method.

i believe what you're looking for is the str.encode("string-escape") function. For example, if you have a variable that you want to 'raw string':
a = '\x89'
a.encode('unicode_escape')
'\\x89'
Note: Use string-escape for python 2.x and older versions
I was searching for a similar solution and found the solution via:
casting raw strings python

Raw strings are not a different kind of string. They are a different way of describing a string in your source code. Once the string is created, it is what it is.

Since strings in Python are immutable, you cannot "make it" anything different. You can however, create a new raw string from s, like this:
raw_s = r'{}'.format(s)

As of Python 3.6, you can use the following (similar to #slashCoder):
def to_raw(string):
return fr"{string}"
my_dir ="C:\data\projects"
to_raw(my_dir)
yields 'C:\\data\\projects'. I'm using it on a Windows 10 machine to pass directories to functions.

raw strings apply only to string literals. they exist so that you can more conveniently express strings that would be modified by escape sequence processing. This is most especially useful when writing out regular expressions, or other forms of code in string literals. if you want a unicode string without escape processing, just prefix it with ur, like ur'somestring'.

For Python 3, the way to do this that doesn't add double backslashes and simply preserves \n, \t, etc. is:
a = 'hello\nbobby\nsally\n'
a.encode('unicode-escape').decode().replace('\\\\', '\\')
print(a)
Which gives a value that can be written as CSV:
hello\nbobby\nsally\n
There doesn't seem to be a solution for other special characters, however, that may get a single \ before them. It's a bummer. Solving that would be complex.
For example, to serialize a pandas.Series containing a list of strings with special characters in to a textfile in the format BERT expects with a CR between each sentence and a blank line between each document:
with open('sentences.csv', 'w') as f:
current_idx = 0
for idx, doc in sentences.items():
# Insert a newline to separate documents
if idx != current_idx:
f.write('\n')
# Write each sentence exactly as it appared to one line each
for sentence in doc:
f.write(sentence.encode('unicode-escape').decode().replace('\\\\', '\\') + '\n')
This outputs (for the Github CodeSearchNet docstrings for all languages tokenized into sentences):
Makes sure the fast-path emits in order.
#param value the value to emit or queue up\n#param delayError if true, errors are delayed until the source has terminated\n#param disposable the resource to dispose if the drain terminates
Mirrors the one ObservableSource in an Iterable of several ObservableSources that first either emits an item or sends\na termination notification.
Scheduler:\n{#code amb} does not operate by default on a particular {#link Scheduler}.
#param the common element type\n#param sources\nan Iterable of ObservableSource sources competing to react first.
A subscription to each source will\noccur in the same order as in the Iterable.
#return an Observable that emits the same sequence as whichever of the source ObservableSources first\nemitted an item or sent a termination notification\n#see ReactiveX operators documentation: Amb
...

Just format like that:
s = "your string"; raw_s = r'{0}'.format(s)

With a little bit correcting #Jolly1234's Answer:
here is the code:
raw_string=path.encode('unicode_escape').decode()

s = "hel\nlo"
raws = '%r'%s #coversion to raw string
#print(raws) will print 'hel\nlo' with single quotes.
print(raws[1:-1]) # will print hel\nlo without single quotes.
#raws[1:-1] string slicing is performed

The solution, which worked for me was:
fr"{orignal_string}"
Suggested in comments by #ChemEnger

I suppose repr function can help you:
s = 't\n'
repr(s)
"'t\\n'"
repr(s)[1:-1]
't\\n'

Just simply use the encode function.
my_var = 'hello'
my_var_bytes = my_var.encode()
print(my_var_bytes)
And then to convert it back to a regular string do this
my_var_bytes = 'hello'
my_var = my_var_bytes.decode()
print(my_var)
--EDIT--
The following does not make the string raw but instead encodes it to bytes and decodes it.

Why is escaping of single quotes inconsistent on file read in Python?

Given two nearly identical text files (plain text, created in MacVim), I get different results when reading them into a variable in Python. I want to know why this is and how I can produce consistent behavior.
For example, f1.txt looks like this:
This isn't a great example, but it works.
And f2.txt looks like this:
This isn't a great example, but it wasn't meant to be.
"But doesn't it demonstrate the problem?," she said.
When I read these files in, using something like the following:
f = open("f1.txt","r")
x = f.read()
I get the following when I look at the variables in the console. f1.txt:
>>> x
"This isn't a great example, but it works.\n\n"
And f2.txt:
>>> y
'This isn\'t a great example, but it wasn\'t meant to be. \n"But doesn\'t it demonstrate the problem?," she said.\n\n'
In other words, f1 comes in with only escaped newlines, while f2 also has its single quotes escaped.
repr() shows what's going on. first for f1:
>>> repr(x)
'"This isn\'t a great example, but it works.\\n\\n"'
And f2:
>>> repr(y)
'\'This isn\\\'t a great example, but it wasn\\\'t meant to be. \\n"But doesn\\\'t it demonstrate the problem?," she said.\\n\\n\''
This kind of behavior is driving me crazy. What's going on and how do I make it consistent? If it matters, I'm trying to read in plain text, manipulate it, and eventually write it out so that it shows the properly escaped characters (for pasting into Javascript code).

Python is giving you a string literal which, if you gave it back to Python, would result in the same string. This is known as the repr() (short for "representation") of the string. This may not (probably won't, in fact) match the string as it was originally specified, since there are so many ways to do that, and Python does not record anything about how it was originally specified.
It uses double quotes around your first example, which works fine because it doesn't contain any double quotes. The second string contains double quotes, so it can't use double quotes as a delimiter. Instead it uses single quotes and uses backslashes to escape the single quotes in the string (it doesn't have to escape the double quotes this way, and there are more of them than there are single quotes). This keeps the representation as short as possible.
There is no reason for this behavior to drive you crazy and no need to try to make it consistent. You only get the repr() of a string when you are peeking at values in Python's interactive mode. When you actually print or otherwise use the string, you get the string itself, not a reconstituted string literal.
If you want to get a JavaScript string literal, the easiest way is to use the json module:
import json
print json.dumps('I said, "Hello, world!"')

Both f1 and f2 contain perfectly normal, unescaped single quotes.
The fact that their repr looks different is meaningless.
There are a variety of different ways to represent the same string. For example, these are all equivalent literals:
"abc'def'ghi"
'abc\'def\'ghi'
'''abc'def'ghi'''
r"abc'def'ghi"
The repr function on a string always just generates some literal that is a valid representation of that string, but you shouldn't depend on exactly which one it generate. (In fact, you should rarely use it for anything but debugging purposes in the first place.)
Since the language doesn't define anywhere what algorithm it uses to generate a repr, it could be different for each version of each implementation.
Most of them will try to be clever, using single or double quotes to avoid as many escaped internal quotes as possible, but even that isn't guaranteed. If you really want to know the algorithm for a particular implementation and version, you pretty much have to look at the source. For example, in CPython 3.3, inside unicode_repr, it counts the number of quotes of each type; then if there are single quotes but no double quotes, it uses " instead of '.
If you want "the" representation of a string, you're out of luck, because there is no such thing. But if you want some particular representation of a string, that's no problem. You just have to know what format you want; most formats, someone's already written the code, and often it's in the standard library. You can make C literal strings, JSON-encoded strings, strings that can fit into ASCII RFC822 headers… But all of those formats have different rules from each other (and from Python literals), so you have to use the right function for the job.

Is it possible to suppress Python's escape sequence processing on a given string without using the raw specifier?

Conclusion: It's impossible to override or disable Python's built-in escape sequence processing, such that, you can skip using the raw prefix specifier. I dug into Python's internals to figure this out. So if anyone tries designing objects that work on complex strings (like regex) as part of some kind of framework, make sure to specify in the docstrings that string arguments to the object's __init__() MUST include the r prefix!
Original question: I am finding it a bit difficult to force Python to not "change" anything about a user-inputted string, which may contain among other things, regex or escaped hexadecimal sequences. I've already tried various combinations of raw strings, .encode('string-escape') (and its decode counterpart), but I can't find the right approach.
Given an escaped, hexadecimal representation of the Documentation IPv6 address 2001:0db8:85a3:0000:0000:8a2e:0370:7334, using .encode(), this small script (called x.py):
#!/usr/bin/env python
class foo(object):
__slots__ = ("_bar",)
def __init__(self, input):
if input is not None:
self._bar = input.encode('string-escape')
else:
self._bar = "qux?"
def _get_bar(self): return self._bar
bar = property(_get_bar)
#
x = foo("\x20\x01\x0d\xb8\x85\xa3\x00\x00\x00\x00\x8a\x2e\x03\x70\x73\x34")
print x.bar
Will yield the following output when executed:
$ ./x.py
\x01\r\xb8\x85\xa3\x00\x00\x00\x00\x8a.\x03ps4
Note the \x20 got converted to an ASCII space character, along with a few others. This is basically correct due to Python processing the escaped hex sequences and converting them to their printable ASCII values.
This can be solved if the initializer to foo() was treated as a raw string (and the .encode() call removed), like this:
x = foo(r"\x20\x01\x0d\xb8\x85\xa3\x00\x00\x00\x00\x8a\x2e\x03\x70\x73\x34")
However, my end goal is to create a kind of framework that can be used and I want to hide these kinds of "implementation details" from the end user. If they called foo() with the above IPv6 address in escaped hexadecimal form (without the raw specifier) and immediately print it back out, they should get back exactly what they put in w/o knowing or using the raw specifier. So I need to find a way to have foo's __init__() do whatever processing is necessary to enable that.
Edit: Per this SO question, it seems it's a defect of Python, in that it always performs some kind of escape sequence processing. There does not appear to be any kind of facility to completely turn off escape sequence processing, even temporarily. Sucks. I guess I am going to have to research subclassing str to create something like rawstr that intelligently determines what escape sequences Python processed in a string, and convert them back to their original format. This is not going to be fun...
Edit2: Another example, given the sample regex below:
"^.{0}\xcb\x00\x71[\x00-\xff]"
If I assign this to a var or pass it to a function without using the raw specifier, the \x71 gets converted to the letter q. Even if I add .encode('string-escape') or .replace('\\', '\\\\'), the escape sequences are still processed. thus resulting in this output:
"^.{0}\xcb\x00q[\x00-\xff]"
How can I stop this, again, without using the raw specifier? Is there some way to "turn off" the escape sequence processing or "revert" it after the fact thus that the q turns back into \x71? Is there a way to process the string and escape the backslashes before the escape sequence processing happens?

I think you have an understandable confusion about a difference between Python string literals (source code representation), Python string objects in memory, and how that objects can be printed (in what format they can be represented in the output).
If you read some bytes from a file into a bytestring you can write them back as is.
r"" exists only in source code there is no such thing at runtime i.e., r"\x" and "\\x" are equal, they may even be the exact same string object in memory.
To see that input is not corrupted, you could print each byte as an integer:
print " ".join(map(ord, raw_input("input something")))
Or just echo as is (there could be a difference but it is unrelated to your "string-escape" issue):
print raw_input("input something")
Identity function:
def identity(obj):
return obj
If you do nothing to the string then your users will receive the exact same object back. You can provide examples in the docs what you consider a concise readable way to represent input string as Python literals. If you find confusing to work with binary strings such as "\x20\x01" then you could accept ascii hex-representation instead: "2001" (you could use binascii.hexlify/unhexlify to convert one to another).
The regex case is more complex because there are two languages:
Escapes sequences are interpreted by Python according to its string literal syntax
Regex engine interprets the string object as a regex pattern that also has its own escape sequences

I think you will have to go the join route.
Here's an example:
>>> m = {chr(c): '\\x{0}'.format(hex(c)[2:].zfill(2)) for c in xrange(0,256)}
>>>
>>> x = "\x20\x01\x0d\xb8\x85\xa3\x00\x00\x00\x00\x8a\x2e\x03\x70\x73\x34"
>>> print ''.join(map(m.get, x))
\x20\x01\x0d\xb8\x85\xa3\x00\x00\x00\x00\x8a\x2e\x03\x70\x73\x34
I'm not entirely sure why you need that though. If your code needs to interact with other pieces of code, I'd suggest that you agree on a defined format, and stick to it.

Why does python use unconventional triple-quotation marks for comments?

Why didn't python just use the traditional style of comments like C/C++/Java uses:
/**
* Comment lines
* More comment lines
*/
// line comments
// line comments
//
Is there a specific reason for this or is it just arbitrary?

Python doesn't use triple quotation marks for comments. Comments use the hash (a.k.a. pound) character:
# this is a comment
The triple quote thing is a doc string, and, unlike a comment, is actually available as a real string to the program:
>>> def bla():
... """Print the answer"""
... print 42
...
>>> bla.__doc__
'Print the answer'
>>> help(bla)
Help on function bla in module __main__:
bla()
Print the answer
It's not strictly required to use triple quotes, as long as it's a string. Using """ is just a convention (and has the advantage of being multiline).

A number of the answers got many of the points, but don't give the complete view of how things work. To summarize...
# comment is how Python does actual comments (similar to bash, and some other languages). Python only has "to the end of the line" comments, it has no explicit multi-line comment wrapper (as opposed to javascript's /* .. */). Most Python IDEs let you select-and-comment a block at a time, this is how many people handle that situation.
Then there are normal single-line python strings: They can use ' or " quotation marks (eg 'foo' "bar"). The main limitation with these is that they don't wrap across multiple lines. That's what multiline-strings are for: These are strings surrounded by triple single or double quotes (''' or """) and are terminated only when a matching unescaped terminator is found. They can go on for as many lines as needed, and include all intervening whitespace.
Either of these two string types define a completely normal string object. They can be assigned a variable name, have operators applied to them, etc. Once parsed, there are no differences between any of the formats. However, there are two special cases based on where the string is and how it's used...
First, if a string just written down, with no additional operations applied, and not assigned to a variable, what happens to it? When the code executes, the bare string is basically discarded. So people have found it convenient to comment out large bits of python code using multi-line strings (providing you escape any internal multi-line strings). This isn't that common, or semantically correct, but it is allowed.
The second use is that any such bare strings which follow immediately after a def Foo(), class Foo(), or the start of a module, are treated as string containing documentation for that object, and stored in the __doc__ attribute of the object. This is the most common case where strings can seem like they are a "comment". The difference is that they are performing an active role as part of the parsed code, being stored in __doc__... and unlike a comment, they can be read at runtime.

Triple-quotes aren't comments. They're string literals that span multiple lines and include those line breaks in the resulting string. This allows you to use
somestr = """This is a rather long string containing
several lines of text just as you would do in C.
Note that whitespace at the beginning of the line is\
significant."""
instead of
somestr = "This is a rather long string containing\n\
several lines of text just as you would do in C.\n\
Note that whitespace at the beginning of the line is\
significant."

Most scripting languages use # as a comment marker so to skip automatically the shebang (#!) which specifies to the program loader the interpreter to run (like in #!/bin/bash). Alternatively, the interpreter could be instructed to automatically skip the first line, but it's way more convenient just to define # as comment marker and that's it, so it's skipped as a consequence.

Guido - the creator of Python, actually weighs in on the topic here:
https://twitter.com/gvanrossum/status/112670605505077248?lang=en
In summary - for multiline comments, just use triple quotes. For academic purposes - yes it technically is a string, but it gets ignored because it is never used or assigned to a variable.