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22. Escape Characters and Raw Strings

1. Introduction​

Sometimes you need special characters inside strings, like a newline or a tab.
Python uses escape sequences to represent these characters.
A raw string can be used when you want to ignore escape sequences.

2. What is an Escape Character?​

  • An escape character starts with a backslash (\).
  • It tells Python to treat the next character in a special way.

3. Common Escape Sequences​

print("Hello\nWorld")   # Newline
print("Hello\tWorld")   # Tab
print("She said \"Hi\"") # Double quotes inside string
print('It\'s Python')   # Single quote inside string
print("C:\\Users\\Name") # Backslash itself

Output:

Hello
World
Hello   World
She said "Hi"
It's Python
C:\Users\Name

4. Multiline Strings​

You can also use triple quotes (""" or ''') to handle multi-line text without needing \n:

text = """Line one
Line two
Line three"""
print(text)

5. Unicode and Special Characters​

Python strings support Unicode.
You can include characters using escape sequences:

print("\u03C0")  # π (Greek letter pi)
print("\u00A9")  # © symbol

6. Raw Strings​

  • A raw string is created by prefixing with r or R.
  • Escape sequences inside raw strings are not processed.
path = r"C:\Users\Name\Documents"
print(path)  # C:\Users\Name\Documents

Without r:

path = "C:\Users\Name\Documents"
print(path)  # Error or unexpected result

7. When to Use Raw Strings​

  • File paths in Windows (C:\...).
  • Regular expressions (\d, \s, etc.).
  • Any time you want Python to treat backslashes literally.

8. Common Mistakes​

  • Forgetting to escape backslashes: 
    print("C:\new_folder")   # Error or unwanted behavior
    Better: 
    print("C:\\new_folder")  # Escaped backslash
    print(r"C:\new_folder")  # Raw string

9. Next Steps​

✅ You now understand escape characters and raw strings.
In the next chapter, we’ll dive into lists, one of Python’s most versatile data types.