String replace with backslashes in Python

Question

I'm trying to do a simple replacement of " " with "\s" (the literal \s, not some sort of backslash escape). This is what I think should happen:

>>> 'asdf hjkl'.replace(' ', '\s')
'asdf\shjkl'

I did this:

>>> 'asdf hjkl'.replace(' ', '\s')
'asdf\\shjkl'
>>> 'asdf hjkl'.replace(' ', '\\s')
'asdf\\shjkl'

Neither returns what I expected, and I can't for the life of me understand what's going on. What input do I have to use to get my expected output?

Answer 1

You're getting what you want. It just doesn't look that way in the REPL:

>>> 'asdf hjkl'.replace(' ', '\s')[4]
'\\'

As you can see, that's one character, not two.

Try printing it:

>>> print 'asdf hjkl'.replace(' ', '\s')
asdf\shjkl

Answer 2

The result is only displayed, try the following,

a = 'asdf hjkl'.replace(' ','\s')
print a