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I want to replace "'" with "\'" inside the word "O'Fallon". But when I use the following code:

City="O'Fallon"
City.replace("'","\'")

I get "O'Fallon" as the output and when use this code:

City="O'Fallon"
City.replace("'","\\'")

I get "O\\'Fallon" as the output. Could you please help me on this?

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  • The double slash is normal behaviour. Try print City.replace("'", "\\'"). Commented Apr 28, 2015 at 17:14
  • I think you're looking for something like repr(City) or pipes.quote(City) (or shlex.quote() on Python >= 3.3), depending on what environment you want to escape your string for. Commented Apr 28, 2015 at 17:16
  • @MartijnPieters obviously, that's why the OP thinks their second attempt doesn't work. But my point was: If they have need to escape single quotes, they probably need to escape strings that are going to be interpreted by a specific parser. Maybe Python, maybe a shell, who knows. Sot hey should use a function that properly escapes every character with special meaning in the target environment, and not just replace single quotes. Commented Apr 28, 2015 at 17:25
  • @LukasGraf: right, I see what you mean. I made a similar comment below, sensing that they are using this in a SQL query somewhere. At which point you'd ask the database driver to do the escaping.. Commented Apr 28, 2015 at 17:30

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That's just the representation shown in the console.

If you print it, you'll see it's all fine.

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4 Comments

I don't want to print it, I want to add it as a part of a query.
Doesn't matter. It's fine.
@user2079550: the print shows you that the value contains just the one backslash, not two. Another way to see this is to use result[1:3], len(result[1:3]), which will produce ("\\'", 2). You can use it as part of a query.
@user2079550: however, if this is part of a SQL query, then don't try and escape the values yourself. Leave that to the database driver, use SQL parameters, not string concatenation or interpolation.

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