removing an backslash from a string [duplicate]

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 the '. It was read in from another source. I want to remove it, but can't. I've tried. sentence.replace("\'","'")

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

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

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

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

I know the \ is to escape something, so not sure how to do it with the quotes

Answer 1

The \ is just there to escape the ' character. It is only visible in the representation (repr) of the string, it's not actually a character in the string. See the following 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 to use:

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

You need two backslashes because first of them act as escape symbol, and second is symbol that you need to replace.