Process escape sequences in a string in Python

Question

Sometimes when I get input from a file or the user, I get a string with escape sequences in it. I would like to process the escape sequences in the same way that Python proc

Answer 1

This is a bad way of doing it, but it worked for me when trying to interpret escaped octals passed in a string argument.

input_string = eval('b"' + sys.argv[1] + '"')

It's worth mentioning that there is a difference between eval and ast.literal_eval (eval being way more unsafe). See Using python's eval() vs. ast.literal_eval()?