Remove backslash from string

Question

I have a string that is a sentence like I don't want it, there'll be others

So the text looks like this: I don\'t want it, there\'ll be other

for some reason a \comes with the text next to '. This has been read from another source. I want to delete it, but I can’t. I tried. sentence.replace("\'","'")

sentence.replace(r"\'","'")

sentence.replace("\\","")

sentence.replace(r"\\","")

sentence.replace(r"\\\\","")

I know I have \to avoid something, so I'm not sure how to do this with quotation marks

Answer 1

\is there escape ' . This is only visible in the reprstring representation ( ), it is not a character in the string. See Next Demo

>>> repr("I don't want it, there'll be others")
'"I don\'t want it, there\'ll be others"'

>>> print("I don't want it, there'll be others")
I don't want it, there'll be others

Answer 2

Try using:

sentence.replace("\\", "")

, escape-, - , .

Answer 3

Better use regex to remove backslashes:

>>> re.sub(u"u\005c'", r"'", "I don\'t want it, there\'ll be other")
"I don't want it, there'll be other"

Answer 4

If your text comes from workaround text and you did not clear it by undoing it before processing it using the NLP tools, you can easily undo HTML markup, for example:

In python2.x:

>>> import sys; sys.version
'2.7.6 (default, Jun 22 2015, 17:58:13) \n[GCC 4.8.2]'
>>> import HTMLParser
>>> txt = """I don\'t want it, there\'ll be other"""
>>> HTMLParser.HTMLParser().unescape(txt)
"I don't want it, there'll be other"

In python3:

>>> import sys; sys.version
'3.4.0 (default, Jun 19 2015, 14:20:21) \n[GCC 4.8.2]'
>>> import html
>>> txt = """I don\'t want it, there\'ll be other"""
>>> html.unescape(txt)
"I don't want it, there'll be other"

See also: How to remove HTML objects in a string in Python 3.1?