Are you trying to escape for a regular expression? Just do re.escape().
>>> print re.escape('Happy') Happy >>> print re.escape("Frank's Diner") Frank\'s\ Diner If you're escaping for URLs, there's urllib2.quote(), for a command line, use subprocess.list2cmdline. Generally, the module that consumes the string should provide a function like escape(). On Jun 24, 1:27 pm, regex_jedi <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > ok, I have looked a lot of places, and can't seem to get a clear > answer... > > I have a string called > each_theme > > Some values of the string may contain a single quote as in - > Happy > Sad > Nice > Frank's Laundry > Explosion > > Notice that the 4th value has a single quote in it. Well, I need to > make sure that the single quote is escaped before handing it off for > further processing to a class I later call for some other processing. > > So I thought, no big deal, I should be able to find a way to escape > the single quote on the string. I am a perl and PHP guy, so I do a > lot of regex stuff. I did a quick search and found someone had said > to use this re.sub function, so I tried. But the following doesn't > work. To be honest, I am a little lost with all the modules and > classes required to do simple math or string functions in Python. > None of it seems built it in.. its all import modules... Here is what > I am trying... > > # escape single quotes in theme name > re.sub('''(['"])''', r'\\\1', each_theme) > > you python masters... show me the way please... > > thanks > regex_jedi -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list