Python How to remove \" from a string

Question

I got this code from somewhere online, and saved it in a variable called "doc".

doc = """{"Grade": "  \"B+\"  "}"""

I want doc to print

{"Grade": "  B+  "}

So that I can use ast.literal_eval() to convert "doc" into a dictionary.

But when I try:

print(doc)

It prints:

{"Grade": "  "B+"  "}

Which is not what I want because then ast.literal_eval() won't work.

Or:

print(doc.replace("\"", ''))

which gives me:

{Grade:   B+  }

It completely removes the double quote, which is not what I want either because ast.literal_eval() gives an error.

So how can I change "doc" so that

doc = """{"Grade": "  \"B+\"  "}"""

can print the following code after some work?

{"Grade": "  B+  "}

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

We can just convert the repeated double quotes to a single set of double quotes with re.sub():

In [95]: doc = """{"Grade": "  \"B+\"  "}"""

In [96]: doc
Out[96]: '{"Grade": "  "B+"  "}'

In [98]: re.sub(r'["]\s*["]', '"', doc)
Out[98]: '{"Grade": "B+"}'

In [99]: import ast

In [101]: doc = re.sub(r'["]\s*["]', '"', doc)

In [102]: ast.literal_eval(doc)
Out[102]: {'Grade': 'B+'}

Answer 2

Ok I assume that you have a string in the form {"key": "value"} in which the value could contain unquoted double quotes. In your example, we have Grade for key and "B+" for value.

In that case, you can either remove the inner quotes or correctly quote them, but you should split the string to identify the value part

start, value, last = re.match(r'(\s*{\s*".*?"\s*:\s*")(.*)("\s*})', doc).groups()

You can then easily process quotes in the value part:

fixed = value.replace('"', "") # remove quotes

or

fixed = value.replace('"', r'\"') # correctly quotes the double quotes

You can then successfully write:

d = ast.litteral_eval(start + fixed + last)

and get either {'Grade': ' B+ '} or {'Grade': ' "B+" '}