How to escape special characters of a string with single backslashes

Question

I'm trying to escape the characters -]\^$*. each with a single backslash \.

For example the string: ^stack.*/overflo\w$arr=1 will become:

\^stack\.\*/overflo\\w\$arr=1 

What's the most efficient way to do that in Python?

re.escape double escapes which isn't what I want:

'\\^stack\\.\\*\\/overflow\\$arr\\=1' 

I need this to escape for something else (nginx).

Answer 1

This is one way to do it (in Python 3.x):

escaped = a_string.translate(str.maketrans({"-":  r"\-",                                           "]":  r"\]",                                           "\\": r"\\",                                           "^":  r"\^",                                           "$":  r"\$",                                           "*":  r"\*",                                           ".":  r"\."})) 

For reference, for escaping strings to use in regex:

import re escaped = re.escape(a_string)