Add 'r' prefix to a python variable

Question

I have string variable which is

temp = '1\2\3\4'

I would like to add a prefix 'r' to the string variable and get

r'1\2\3\4'

so that I can split the string based on '\'. I tried the following:

r'temp'
'r' + temp
r + temp

But none of the above works. Is there a simple to do it? I'm using python 3. I also tried to encode the string, using

temp.encode('string-escape')

But it returns the following error

LookupError: unknown encoding: string-escape

Answer 1

r is a prefix for string literals. This means, r"1\2\3\4" will not interpret \ as an escape when creating the string value, but keep \ as an actual character in the string. Thus, r"1\2\3\4" will have seven characters.

You already have the string value: there is nothing to interpret. You cannot have the r prefix affect a variable, only a literal.

Your temp = "1\2\3\4" will interpret backslashes as escapes, create the string '1\x02\x03\x04' (a four-character string), then assign this string to the variable temp. There is no way to retroactively reinterpret the original literal.

EDIT: In view of the more recent comments, you do not seem to, in fact, have a string "1\2\3\4". If you have a valid path, you can split it using

path.split(r'\')

or

path.split('\\')

but you probably also don't need that; rather, you may want to split a path into directory and file name, which is best done by os.path functions.