Replacing a text with \n in it, with a real \n output

Question

I am trying to get a config from a juniper router and I have the following problem:

After setting this

stdin, stdout, stderr = client1.exec_command('show configuration interfaces %s' % SID)
 CONFIG = stdout.read()
 print CONFIG

It brings me something like these

'description El_otro_Puerto_de_la_Routing-instance;\nvlan-id 309;\nfamily inet {\n    mtu 1600;\n    address 10.100.10.10/24;\n}\n'

and the problem is that I want to receive that information in this format:

'description El_otro_Puerto_de_la_Routing-instance;
 nvlan-id 309;
 nfamily inet {
  mtu 1600;
  address 10.100.10.10/24;
 }

So I want the \n to actually be a new line, and not just to show me the "\n" string.

Answer 1

If you're running this in the Python interpreter, it is the regular behavior of the interpreter to show newlines as "\n" instead of actual newlines, because it makes it easier to debug the output. If you want to get actual newlines within the interpreter, you should print the string you get.

If this is what the program is outputting (i.e.: You're getting newline escape sequences from the external program), you should use the following:

OUTPUT = stdout.read()
formatted_output = OUTPUT.replace('\\n', '\n').replace('\\t', '\t')
print formatted_output

This will replace escaped newlines by actual newlines in the output string.

Answer 2

An alternative to what you want is splitting your string into a list of strings (per line).

mystr = 'a\nb\nc'
mystr = mystr.split(sep='\n')
print(mystr)
#this will be your print output:['a', 'b', 'c']
for s in mystr:
    print(s)
#your print output:
#a
#b
#c

Answer 3

This also works:

CONFIG = """{}""".format(CONFIG)

Answer 4

In python 3+, the best way to interpret all escape characters is:

print(f"{yourStringHere}")

This uses f-strings which, in my opinion, is probably the most elegant way to solve this issue.

Answer 5

A regular expression can help with locating the \x sequences. The substitution-pairs will still have to be specified manually though, just like in @PedroCastilho's answer.

import re
CONFIG = stdout.read()
print(re.sub(r'\\.',lambda x:{'\\n':'\n','\\t':'\t'}.get(x[0],x[0]),CONFIG))

This will replace \\n-s and \\t-s with actual line breaks and tabulators, and leaves the unknown ones intact.

Like

print(re.sub(r'\\.',lambda x:{'\\n':'\n','\\t':'\t'}.get(x[0],x[0]),
      'foo\\nbar\\nbaz\\tbrr\\n\\q'))

prints

foo
bar
baz     brr
\q

So line breaks and the tabulator are in place, and \q simply survived.