Quoting backslashes in Python string literals

Question

I have a string that contains both double-quotes and backslashes that I want to set to a variable in Python. However, whenever I try to set it, the quotes or slashes are eit

Answer 1

What Harley said, except the last point - it's not actually necessary to change the '/'s into '\'s before calling open. Windows is quite happy to accept paths with forward slashes.

infile = open('c:/folder/subfolder/file.txt')

The only time you're likely to need the string normpathed is if you're passing to to another program via the shell (using os.system or the subprocess module).